Recently I was listening to the radio and the caller was discussing that, in his opinion, all white people were biased and prejudiced against minorities. Even the host of the show, a pretty hard core liberal, was taken aback at the statement. But the caller refused to yield, citing examples of alleged prejudice where pretty much anything a white person said was deemed biased.
Obviously this person is an aberration, indeed most of the calls who followed him (including many from minorities) said as much (and given that this is the Bay Area I doubt we had many rednecks calling in). However at the same time many of the callers did state that when people ‘make assumptions’ that it was bias or prejudice.
As it happened, while I was listening to the show, something happened to me that sparked the idea for this posting. I encountered the same annoyance that many drivers have had to deal with, the slow driver. I don’t mean just someone who is a little slow but the dreaded 40 in a 60 mph person.
I got to thinking about what assumptions someone might make about the driver based on the slow speed. I came up with four categories.
The first category was that of the elderly driver. In this I am probably joined by most drivers around the country as it’s a pretty common assumption. It’s also, in my view, a reasonable one. This is not to say that all slow drivers are elderly or that all elderly people are slow drivers. Indeed I’ve known some senior citizens who were among the best drivers I’ve ever seen.
But given the issues of fading vision, slowing reflexes, etc it is not uncommon for a slow driver to be an older person and to assume that is not biased or prejudiced, just a stacking of the odds.
Another category was the “idiot with a cell phone” assumption and I cut those people very little slack. In this case I don’t excuse their slow driving because you should not drive and talk, but the assumption is reasonable I think.
However it is in the other two options that I made assumptions that some might see as biased, and I thought I’d offer them for purposes of the discussion.
The first of these options was that the driver could have been a Southeast Asian woman.
Now for those who do not live in a community with a large SE Asian population this certainly could seem to be a bit biased, but there are some cultural factors at work here. To begin with, there is a very traditional attitude in the SE Asian communities (which are very homogenous) with regard to the roles of men and women.
Women are supposed to stay in the home and be housewives. They aren’t really supposed to go out very much (other than to do traditional housewife kind of things) and so on. In addition there is a strong (and understandable) suspicion of government in the community.
As a result it is not uncommon for these women to be driving without licenses. They get a short bit of instruction from their husband and that’s about it. Consequently they often are very nervous and overly cautious in driving. Again this is not to say that ALL people in the community are that way, it’s a fairly small sub-culture that sticks to the very traditional roles. But when you have a large community like we do, it does produce a subset who you tend to encounter out on the road.
The second potentially biased option was that the driver was Hispanic. Again, I want to be clear that the overwhelming majority of the Hispanic community is very law abiding and it would be wrong to make any blanket assumptions.
But there is a large migrant farm worker community in the valley and at least some of them are, to use the polite term, undocumented. Most of these people are good, hardworking family men and women, but they do live in fear of being stopped by the police (for the obvious reason that they lack documentation). So they always drive well below the speed limit to avoid any chance of being stopped for speeding.
Now I would argue that neither of these assumptions are biased or prejudiced. I don’t assume that all bad or slow drivers fall into one of these three categories nor do I assume that ALL elderly people or SE Asian women or Hispanics are bad drivers. I don’t even assume that anything beyond a very small minority are. But, given the statistics, a pretty significant majority of slow drivers fall into one of these categories.
So, what do you say folks ?