Yes to Possible Worlds and "What Ifs?"

“Counterfactuals may be effective for political posturing, dramatic effect, or peddling outlandish pseudoscientific ideas, but they are not useful in advancing public discourse about race, gun violence, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, or any of the myriad issues our society faces.”
Rene Luis Alvarez

I could not disagree with this idea more. My co-blogger, a historian, argues for an empirically driven examination of the past as a guide for how we should construct policy for the future. I agree that looking at data and past events can help us avoid pitfalls and emulate ideas that have been proven to work; However, sometimes the ideas that we use are adopted and held on to because of tradition or politics, and may also have roots in pseudo-science.

A recent example of someone adhering to unsupported ideas in the creation of policy is Jason Richwine, the Harvard PhD who argued in his dissertation that Latinos are genetically intellectually inferior and thus are not worth investing in or even admitting into the country. The basis of his argument, scores on IQ tests, has long been called into question as true measures of intelligence. Such empiricism and “fact-based” arguments have been around for years and they have been shown to be of only limited validity for years. Even a member of Richwine’s dissertation committee thought so. George Borjas regarding his student's focus stated , "I don't find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability. I've been lucky to have met many high-IQ people in academia who are total losers, and many smart, but not super-smart people, who are incredibly successful because of persistence, motivation, etc. So I just think that, on the whole, the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”

But we hang on to these failed ideas from the past, nonetheless. As Albert Einstein stated, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But, to be more accurate, the results were the ones that xenophobes and supremacists desire—putting down minority groups and legally and culturally making it acceptable to do so. Many apologists for George Zimmerman have used “facts” to show that we really should profile African Americans given their higher incarceration rates, higher crime rates, and higher crime rates against whites compared to the rate of violence against blacks that whites commit. These are all facts, but they fail to entertain the world of possibilities. The problem is that African-Americans are seen as criminals and the perceived solution is that African-Americans should be treated as criminals. It is this logic that shows a real lack of imagination and empathy-two key reasons to use, “what if?” questions.

Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized scholar and educational advisor who promotes creativity, suggests that imagination and empathy are inextricably linked. By asking “what if?” questions, we place ourselves in the shoes of others, we imagine innovative solutions to deeply entrenched problems, and we have fun while doing it.

An article in The Atlantic points to the very idea of using creativity to encourage engagement and joy in learning. The article describes The Future Project, an organization that aims to encourage creative thinking and imagination in children. They argue that this is desperately needed given that we have become so limited in the way we teach children to adhere to standardized measures of their performance.

Daniel Pink, a writer who focuses on leadership and productivity in business, has argued that by giving people freedom and space to think and imagine, that they will actually become more efficient than if they were given incentives or punishments. He presents compelling evidence from social psychology and behavioral economics to show that this is true. 

So, having time to think, just like a history professor, or a blogger, or a journalist might, is really a great thing. That is where we have the potential to create the type of world that we really would like to live in. As Robert Kennedy stated, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

And to the question of “why not?” I would definitely add, “what if?”

The Uselessness of "What if...?" Questions

“Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.  What if it were true?  Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history?”

These lines open the History Channel series Ancient Aliens.  The show purports to examine and reveal the hidden truths of how extraterrestrial travelers influenced the course of human history.  Apparently alien involvement has been pretty extensive.  According to the show, aliens are responsible for pretty much every major development of the past; including dinosaur extinction, human evolution, the growth of civilization, the founding of religions, the American Revolution, and the rise of Nazi Germany, to name a few.  Now in its fifth season, I suppose Ancient Aliens would be considered a hit, but it is not without its detectors, who attempt to debunk the show’s claims on a point-by-point basis by showing how ancient alien proponents misrepresent or distort available evidence to defend their positions.  While valid, these critiques overlook a more fundamental problem, evidenced by the program’s opening lines.  The entire enterprise is based on the counterfactual question “What if it were true?”  The fact is that it is not true and engaging in counterfactual inquiry is a poor way to think about the past.

Most people probably are familiar with counterfactuals.  Some of the more popular ones include: What if the South had won the Civil War?  What if the Allies had lost World War II?  What if the United States did not drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  The facts remain, however, that the North won the Civil War, the Axis powers lost World War II, and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan.  To consider otherwise holds little value.

In his seminal book, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Perennial, 1970), David Hackett Fischer discusses the limitations of counterfactuals, or “the fallacy of fictional questions” as he calls them.  “There is nothing fallacious in fictional constructs,” Fischer writes, “as long as they are properly recognized for what they are and are clearly distinguished from empirical problems.”  Fischer acknowledges counterfactuals’ usefulness as metaphors or analogies of suggested inference, but concludes, “[T]hey prove nothing and can never be proved by an empirical method” (original emphasis, page 16).

I thought about counterfactuals in the wake of this week’s verdict in George Zimmerman’s trial.  There are variations on this theme, but the dominating fictional question asks “What if Trayvon Martin were white and George Zimmerman were black?”  Martin’s father advanced this idea during his interview on the Today show, further asking of the jurors “What would your verdict have been had it been your child?”

The loss of any life through gun violence is tragic.  For some, the tragedy of gun violence plays out on a nearly daily basis.  Nevertheless, the facts of this case remain that Martin was an African American male teenager, Zimmerman is an Hispanic male adult, and the prosecution failed to prove its case against Zimmerman beyond a reasonable doubt according to the rules of our system of jurisprudence.  “What if” questions and similar conjectures about this case do not alter these facts.

 

Counterfactuals may be effective for political posturing, dramatic effect, or peddling outlandish pseudoscientific ideas, but they are not useful in advancing public discourse about race, gun violence, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, or any of the myriad issues our society faces.  To paraphrase Fischer, why go out of our way to make difficult problems impossible, when they are already difficult enough to solve as they actually are?

(Latin) America's Pastime: Beisbol

In 2005 Major League Baseball created a ballot for fans to elect the greatest Latino players of all time, known as the Latino Legends Team. Included on that list were notable names such as Roberto Clemente, Rod Carew, Luis Aparicio, and Fernando Valenzuela. The final votes created a team that was heavily composed of more contemporary players, such as Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, Pedro Martinez, and Ivan Rodriguez. While this created some controversy, an even larger one was not realizing how deep Latino roots are in Major League Baseball by not even placing names of some Latinos on the ballot. Two of the most notable omissions were Ted Williams, who spoke fluent Spanish and whose mother was Mexican, or Reginald Martinez Jackson, whose father was half-Puerto Rican.

Latin Americans have played baseball in their own countries since the mid-1800s. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Mexico all played baseball prior to the 20th Century. Cuban students who studied in the United States brought the game home to their country as early as 1860. An American importer, Albert Addlesberg, introduced baseball to Nicaragua in the 1880’s; it was an easy transition from cricket, which the British had already brought there. Mexico and Venezuela each established professional baseball leagues in the 1920’s that continue to exist today.

Two Cuban players, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, played for the Cincinnati Reds in 1911. The first major league player from Latin America was Cuban Charles P. Pedroes, who played in 1902.

Today 27-percent of Major League Baseball players are Latino, with over 24-percent of them born in Latin America. The rest of the Latino players, such as Matthew Garza or Sergio Romo, are U.S.-born American citizens, despite their Spanish names and Mexican heritage.

So, Latinos and Latin Americans have been involved with baseball for well over a century, since the creation of the game, really. In a previous post I commented on how Latin Americans like to remind those from the United States that they are not the only “Americans” in this hemisphere given that countries from North and South America arguably contain “Americans,” too. I don’t buy that argument so much, but when talking about baseball as an “American” pastime, I really have to say that we are talking about more countries than just the United States.

Apparently, not many agree that Latinos have a place in baseball given the uproar that emerged on social media over the All-Star break. First, Cuban Yoenis Cespedes won the homerun derby. In a reprisal of last year’s journalistic performance, Pedro Gomez of ESPN conducted an interview in Spanish and then translated the interviewee’s answers into English. Last year, it was only a few questions to Robinson Cano’s father, who does not speak English, while this year he conducted his entire interview with Cespedes in Spanish, while providing immediate translation. Cespedes has only been in the United States for two years, so it is highly unlikely that his English is very good, as anyone who has taken years of a foreign language in high school can attest to. But his homerun hitting is awesome, and that is what true baseball fans should care about. A vocal few, however, just couldn’t handle it and spouted off with xenophobic and discriminatory comments on Twitter. It is very likely that ESPN approved of this not-so subtle pandering to Latinos and Spanish speaking audiences given that they chose him to do the interview again.

The following day, New York born, Puerto Rican-descent singer, Marc Anthony sang "God Bless America" (in English-I shouldn’t have to qualify that, but, oh well). Again, the Twitter-verse lit up with discriminatory comments questioning his right to sing one of our national songs. Even if he were born in Puerto Rico, those who objected should be reminded that he would still be an American citizen, but I would not expect the critics to know even that given that many misidentified Marc Anthony as Mexican or illegal.

National CBS columnist Gregg Doyel wrote a great response of this All-American issue that I will end with here:

“… people got mad, maybe because people get mad when they’re scared. And people are scared of Spanish. Scared that they don’t understand what others are saying. Envious that they can’t speak two languages. Frightened that maybe this world is changing, and people like us — people who speak only English — will be left behind… America is changing, people. Better or worse, the days of everyone here speaking one language -- a language named for a country in Europe; ironic, really -- are gone. English will always be our native language, but it's not going to be the only language. Those days? Long gone. You can bitch and moan about it, like people decades ago bitched and moaned about integration, but this is the country we have. Understand that.”

Bien dicho.

Your "Daily" Dose

In my recent post, I suggested that categorical labels like “Hispanic” or “Latino” homogenize the cultural heritages of people with ancestral roots in Latin America.  It is an idea I have written about before, most notably here and here. 

No sooner had I published my post on Monday evening, when I was treated to this wonderful piece on “The Daily Show” in which Al Madrigal interviews people from different Latino backgrounds about the heterogeneity among Latino populations.  (Who knew Chileans love mayonnaise so much?!?)

I have to admit my envy over how the visual image can accomplish better what the written word at times struggles to do, but I am happy with how this piece demonstrates what I have been saying for years.

Missing the Target?

Everybody is not the same.  That statement may surprise some people, but the fact is different groups of people occasionally dress certain ways, eat particular foods, communicate in certain ways, and generally behave in ways different from one another.  The idea that our differences make us stronger is at the heart of our national identity.  “E Pluribus Unum.”  From many, one.  A danger emerges, however, when one group maintains a belief about another that may or may not fully reflect the realities of the situation.  This is called a stereotype, and it is part of a recently-filed discrimination lawsuit against Target stores.

As reported in the Courthouse News Service, three former Target employees are suing the superstore chain claiming they endured harassment and discrimination, and were fired in retaliation for complaining about it.  One exhibit in the lawsuit is a memo Target allegedly sent to its distribution warehouse managers, entitled “Organizational Effectiveness, Employee and Labor Relations Multi-Cultural Tips.”  Some of the tips regarding Hispanic employees, which several media outlets reported, stated:

“a. Food: not everyone eats tacos and burritos;

b. Music: not everyone dances to salsa;

c. Dress: not everyone wears a sombrero;

d. Mexicans (lower education level, some may be undocumented);

e. Cubans (Political refugees, legal status, higher education level); and

f. They may say 'OK, OK' and pretend to understand, when they do not, just to save face."

On their face, these tips seem inappropriate if not racist.  It seems to me, however, to be a misguided attempt to avoid something of a double-edged sword.  I imagine the struggled thought process in Target’s Human Resources Department in developing these tips went something like this:

Step 1/ Target recognizes cultural diversity among its workforce.

Step 2/ Target desires increased cultural awareness and sensitivity among those managing its workforce.

Step 3/ One way to increase cultural awareness and sensitivity is to dispel existing negative stereotypes.

Step 4/ In order to dispel existing stereotypes, we must first identify what those negative stereotypes are and then acknowledge that they exist.

Step 5/ After we identify negative stereotypes and acknowledge they exist, we must show how they are wrong.

Image by Lalo Alcaraz, July 11, 2013, copyright 2013
Available at http://www.gocomics.com/laloalcaraz/2013/07/11

By stating that not all individuals dress similarly or eat the same foods, Target seems to acknowledge diversity within a particular ethnic group.  Indeed, it would have been patently racist had the document read “All Hispanics wear sombreros and eat tacos.”  Further, by identifying individual groups who compose the category “Hispanic,” the company seems to want to heighten its managers’ awareness that, point in fact, all Hispanics are not the same.  I have suggested before that homogenizing categories like “Hispanic” or “Latino” obviate the rich cultural heritages of people with ancestral roots in Latin American countries.  The Target memo at the very least seems to acknowledge the diversity of those cultural heritages.

Some readers may think, “But who would need to be told so explicitly that these existing stereotypes and generalities are wrong?”  My answer is, “You would be surprised.”  I imagine a large number of people maintain ignorant misconceptions of Hispanics and Latinos in the United States.  Some individuals undoubtedly are willful and racist, but I believe that the majority are just uninformed or under-informed, due largely to a limited or lack of exposure to people from Hispanic and Latino backgrounds.  Two of the several personal experiences confronting people’s ignorance I have had over years illustrate this point.  The first was in 1983 at the start of my high school freshman year Spanish I class.  The conversation with the student seated behind me went something like this:

STUDENT: So this class should be pretty easy for you, huh?

ME: Why do you say that?

STUDENT: Well, your last name is Alvarez, isn’t it?

ME: So what?

STUDENT: Well, you’re Mexican.  This is in your blood so it should come easy for you.

Fast forward about 20 years later, when I am attending a house party of a fellow graduate student who has displayed, not prominently but not inconspicuously, an over-sized novelty sombrero.  That conversation went something like this:

ME: What’s with the sombrero?

HOST: What do you mean?

ME: It might be kind of racist.

HOST: Do you think so?  I got it at "Chi Chi’s" [Mexican restaurant chain]

My point here is not to say whether or not Target discriminated against in employees by composing and distributing the memo in question.  It also is not to say whether or not the managerial tips were discriminatory.  All of that is for the courts to decide.  Rather, my point is to ask, “Why do these stereotypes exist and even prevail?”  To cry “Racism” in answer to this question is a too simplistic knee-jerk reaction.  Such an answer is not likely to result in any open-minded engagement or mind-opening dialog across cultures; which I think should be the goal in our multicultural, E Pluribus Unum society.