Recently I read a book entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. You may have heard about it. The book has been on The New York Times bestseller list recently. Some of you might have even read the book. It is about the way that we come to conclusions in a brief period of time, in the blink of an eye. Much of the book is about stereotypes and the ways that we process information about other people.
One of the chapters in Blink is about Warren G. Harding, the President of the United States from 1921 to 1923. The Harding phenomenon in Blink is described at the beginning of the chapter as a first encounter that Harry Daugherty, his future campaign manager, had with Harding in the lobby of the Globe Hotel near the Ohio state capital, as their shoes were being polished by two other men:
Harding was worth looking at. He was at the time 35 years old. His head, features, shoulders and torso had a size that attracted attention; their proportions to each other made an effect which in any make at any place would justify more than the term handsome—in later years, when he came to be known beyond his local world, the word "Roman" was occasionally in descriptions of him. As he stepped down from the stand, his legs bore out the striking and agreeable proportions of his body; and his lightness on his feet. . . his easy bearing, added to the impression of physical grace and virility. His suppleness, combined with the bigness of his frame, and his large, wide-set rather glowing eyes, heavy black hair, and markedly bronze complexion gave him some of the handsomeness of an Indian. His courtesy as he surrendered his seat to the other customer suggested genuine friendliness toward all mankind. His voice was noticeably resonant, masculine, warm. His pleasure in the attentions of the bootblack's whisk reflected a consciousness about clothes unusual in a small-town man. His manner as he bestowed a tip suggested generous good-nature, a wish to give pleasure, based upon physical well-being and sincere kindliness of heart.1
Based upon this original encounter with Harding Daugherty had an idea: Wouldn't that man make a great President?
In the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes, "Warren G. Harding was not a particularly intelligent man. He liked to play poker and golf and to drink and, most of all, to chase women; in fact, his sexual appetites were the stuff of legend. As he rose from one political office to another, he never once distinguished himself. He was vague and ambivalent on matters of policy. His speeches were once described as ‘an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.' 2 His greatest distinctions in the U. S. Senate were being absent when the most important issues of his time were being debated and voted upon. Historians note that as a United States senator Harding was almost uniquely absent for voting on almost everything. While senator he missed voting on two-thirds of the bills presented. He was probably too busy drinking, gambling and carousing with wild women.
Once elected President of the United States he showed extraordinary leadership by being as absent in that role as he had been in the United States Senate. His administration, which lasted only two years due to his death near the middle of his presidential term, was the most corrupt in American history. While Harding was not necessarily involved in criminal activities, his subordinates certainly were. He never looked critically at the men with whom he entrusted the government of this nation.
Why, oh why, did a man like Warren G. Harding ever become president? It was a recurring theme in his rise to power. He looked like a great leader. He spoke in an even, neutral Midwestern tone. He had physical presence. He had no real leadership gifts nor accomplishments yet he made it to the highest office in the land. He was, most historians agree, the worst president in American history.
What had promoted Harding's meteoric rise to power? What inspired people to think that he could lead this nation? Harding looked the part of a leader. He looked like someone who should be president.
He was also helped by the programmed assumptions that we have about leaders in our culture. At that point in our history, leaders were white men of a certain social class. Harding seemed to be "best of breed" in the terms of dog shows. He was the epitome of what leaders were supposed to look like.
As I read Blink, I came to understand something that had never been clear to me about my personal past. When ministers are just beginning the process toward becoming ministers in our denomination, they have to go through a career counseling assessment by a qualified clergy career counseling center. That means that clergy are given psychological and other examinations, examined for personal history and speak with counselors, psychologists, and other clergy for a period of several days. The results would be sent into the Department of Ministerial Education for those who would decide whether I could be certified as a Unitarian Universalist minister to peruse. When I took my career counseling assessment, I took the battery of tests with most of the members of my entering class at Meadville/Lombard Theological School. We rode from Chicago to the suburban career-counseling center together in one of my classmate's vans for three or four days of this process. You got a cheaper rate if you signed up to take the career counseling assessment as a group.
A month or two later I received my career counseling assessment and I was stunned. It positively glowed about my abilities. My classmates and I compared our results and I was even more surprised that they were not seen in quite as bright a light. Something about this bothered me. I had been the "golden boy" during the career counseling assessment and my seminary classmates gently teased me about it. I had done better than anyone else on the IQ test but I knew that that alone was certainly no reason for my glowing report.
A bit disturbed by the career counseling assessment, I asked the professor of ministry to read through my report and tell me what he thought. He told me that he had read through many reports of that type and that mine was really good. He asked me why I had asked him to read my report. I could not tell him because I did not know.
As I read Blink though several things began to make sense. I discovered that we culturally assume that white men will be leaders. For Euro-Americans our history of leadership has been mostly by white men.
And they have to be tall. Despite the many short kings in history and Napoleon Bonaparte, people expect leaders to be tall. The author of Blink polled half the companies on the Fortune 500 list. Most of the CEOs of those corporations were white men. That comes as no surprise. What was surprising was that most of them were quite tall. Their average height was three inches more than the average American man. In the American population about 14% of men are six feet tall or taller. Among Fortune 500 CEOs however, 58% were six feet tall or taller. More strikingly, in the general population, only about 4% of men are six foot two inches or taller. Among Fortune 500 that figure was roughly a third.
Suddenly I had one of those "aha" moments as I read that piece of information. The career counseling center had assessed that I had a moderate to high church-leadership rating. Yet, at that point in my life I had never actually led any church group. I had been a member of church committees but most of my activities in the church were dedicated to my own projects. I had not expressed great confidence in my leadership ability during the testing and interviews. In fact, I could remember expressing hopes that the ministerial formation process at the seminary would give me the leadership tools that I perceived myself as lacking.
In comparing my report from the career-counseling center with others I learned that some of my classmates had not been given high marks for church leadership skills. Some of them had been leaders in their congregations. Some of them had taken leadership positions on the district level. Why had they not received better marks than my own?
As I read through Blink I began to understand. I remembered my classmates in our group. They were all shorter than me and they were mostly women. I think that the counselors looked at my very bright IQ scores, my height, my gender, my relationship with a female classmate and thought to themselves, somewhat intelligent, straight, white, tall equals leadership, equals fine ministry potential. I think that they looked at my classmates and saw short women and did not have the same reaction.
Now I am not the Warren G. Harding of the Unitarian Universalist ministry. I am though bearing the results of our stereotype of what a leader is like. I did become a leader because I worked at it and knew that I had to develop better leadership skills. My internship, my colleagues and the congregations that I have served have developed my leadership abilities.
My intelligence I claim as my own and do know that sometimes it makes life a little easier when I am called to minister to the highly intelligent people who God or the Universe often sends to Unitarian Universalist Churches. The possession of high intelligence, however, is not necessarily one of the qualities of leadership. Many of our current national leaders could prove that point.
However, in that group I stood above my classmates with poor reasons to jusge that I would be a good minister or a good leader. Some of my short, female classmates had leadership skills and spiritual gifts, yet they did not appear to the career counseling assessment people to be leaders. No, the career-counseling folks were not overtly sexist. They would probably have been horrified at the thought. I think in retrospect that they were not even aware that they were prejudiced in my favor. They were however people living in our culture with our assumptions and our history.
So are you and I. We make assumptions about people all the time. We probably could not function as a society if we did not make some assumptions about the people we encounter based upon a quick glance at their appearance. It is the way that we need to live.
What happens though when those assumptions are all wrong? What if someone who is very different from you has the ability to lead but is denied that possibility? What happens to the world when human potential is wasted and spiritual talents, gifts and intelligence are not acknowledged?
As a tall, educated, white, about-to-be-married-to-a-woman, male I have every advantage in our society. I possess privilege that I did not earn. Privilege is there for many of us in one way or another. Whiteness, heterosexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, social class—they are privileges that were unearned.
When I received my career counseling assessment twelve years ago it bothered me. I did not know then why it bothered me, it just did. Now, however, I realize that for the first time in my life I recognized that I was given privilege because of traits that I had not earned. That was what troubled me about that career assessment. It took years for me to understand it.
Unitarian Universalists are not immune to the dominant culture when it comes to issues of privilege. In every church that I have served or been affiliated with I have heard at least some comments that were racist, ethnocentric, sexist, ageist, ableist, heterosexist, or elitist. Every congregation. Does that mean that Unitarian Universalists are really bigots? No, it means that we reflect the general values of our dominant culture in ways that we do not even recognize. We like to think ourselves superior to the prejudices or our culture but we do not live in a vacuum. We are components of systems of oppression, even as we would resist them.
It is easy to become lulled into believing that we do not participate in forms of oppression. The simple truth is that we all do. We wear clothes made in foreign sweatshops. We eat food grown and prepared by people under almost feudal conditions. And each of us has attitudes that are based upon a historical culture that was openly oppressive.
I hope that you will continue as a religious community to consider the forms of oppression present in our society and even in your own thinking. It might surprise you what messages you have learned and remain in your thinking. Do not assume that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. One of the ways that we are often caught is assuming that we need to conform to certain beliefs. If you discover assumptions in your thinking that you wish were not there, do not despair. None of us grew up in a vacuum. We live in a world that programs us to believe certain things and many of us struggle with those beliefs. Sometimes when we learn about a prejudice we possess we have the possibility of examining it and changing it.
One of the lessons that I learned from the book, Blink, is that in the end human beings can train themselves not to think on the spur of the moment in ways that we have been trained. Do not take that to mean that leaders who are tall, straight, white males should be denied their gifts. One may present himself to you who has all the qualities for which you are looking. But I think that you would not want to choose a leader only on the basis that he is tall, heterosexual, white or male. If you do then you just might get Warren G. Harding.
Few people would be glad to proclaim that they held their positions of power due to reasons that were not connected to their actual abilities. Few of us would want to credit our successes to the fact that we were of the "right" race, gender, height, sexual orientation or social class. It makes it seem that we did not earn our place. The simple truth though is that in recent history, namely our lives, these factors did give us privilege over others. That much cannot be denied. If we are not aware of our historical and contemporary privileges then we are living lives of ignorance and complicity.
The world, as it stands, is not to that point that all have equal opportunity to express their talents, to contribute their gifts to the human story. Many forms of oppression all of over world, and even here, continue to hold humanity back. They are not just the forms of legal oppression, though legal oppression still exists. They are also cultural attitudes that limit the potential for many people. Those cultural attitudes—stereotypes—are present in the media. They are present in the jokes in the locker room. They are present in the places that we go, the things that we buy, sometimes their codes are so subtle that only the excluded can detect them.
In a book entitled Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum writes that she periodically asks the young adults in her college classes to take out a sheet of paper and write down twenty things about themselves. She noticed something interesting. Women always noted that they were women. Black people always noted that they were black. The students who were openly gay or lesbian always wrote that they were gay or lesbian. No straight, white male ever wrote that he was a straight, white male. She explains this by stating that people who have historically experienced oppression tend to continue defining themselves by their distance from power and those in power decide what is the normative form of humanity. That is, straight, white men do not note that as something about themselves because they are the norm against which all others are judged.3
If people still subconsciously and consciously know that they are not at the center of power then they probably are not. One of the things that has taken me more time than I would care to admit was the recognition that if someone feels that he or she is oppressed, then he or she truly is oppressed. By that I mean that if gays or lesbians still feel oppressed even after laws have been decided in their favor then they probably are oppressed. If African-Americans, Latinos, and women feel that they are oppressed then they probably are. One of the things that those of us who are closer to the normal power stereotypes have to learn is to listen. The laws may have changed to create a more equal nation but the reality is that the attitudes that promoted historical oppressions are still with us. The changes that are needed are not the kind that are written into the legal code, though such are still needed, but are the kinds of changes that come about through self-examination, encounter, meditation and prayer. They are they are the stuff of the spiritual and religious life. Only through a process of openness can we share in the lives of our fellow travelers.
We Unitarian Universalists covenant among other things, to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, justice, equality and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process with our congregations and in society at large; the goal of world community with peace liberty and justice for all. Like all people, we often have beliefs that negate our best ethical goals. We bear the reality that we live in a culture that often conflicts with those values that we hold dear. Our task is to learn who we are and what we can do to build a better world. Ours is, in the end, the task of building a culture that reveres every human being and this sacred earth. In doing so we cannot ignore the past or our own flaws, indeed by knowing ourselves we at least know our own struggles, by engaging in conversation about oppression we can better recognize it and come to terms with it. Only through our own recognition with the sacred other can we create a better world—and a better time than we now know.
Let us be in an attitude of prayer or meditation:
Spirit of Life, help us in our journey to see the best in others. Enable us to learn from those who are different. Change us so that we are agents for empowerment rather than oppression. Make clear the human problems of our world, and grant that we will learn to see the possibilities, the Divine Spark, in every human being. Make us agents of love. Show us the way to equality and justice.
Amen.
1. Malcolm Gladwell. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown $ Co., 2005. Pp. 72, 73.
2. Malcolm Gladwell. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2005. Pp. 73, 74.
3. Beverly Daniel Tatum. "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" and Other Conversations About Race. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. 20, 21.
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