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Monday
Julia and I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Bonnie Garmus’s bestselling Lessons in Chemistry, with its indefatigable heroine Elizabeth Zott. The novel took on an added significance this past Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court’s struck down down affirmative action. Although the novel is about white women, not African Americans, it makes clear how universities and research institutes must make a special outreach to groups that they have historically excluded. As Zott, who wants to be a scientist in 1950s America, puts it,
Too many brilliant minds are kept from scientific research thanks to ignorant biases like gender and race. It infuriates me and it should infuriate you. Science has big problems to solve: famine, disease, extinction. And those who purposefully close the door to others using self-serving, outdated cultural notions are not only dishonest, they’re knowingly lazy.
Zott is a feisty, can-do woman who refuses to be kept down. Unfortunately for her, she regularly experiences discrimination and worse. In graduate school, her advisor tries to rape her, and she is then kicked out of the program for defending herself (she perforates his intestine with a #2 pencil). Another employer, attempting the same, has a heart attack when she pulls a knife out of her purse. “When it came to equality,” the book tells us, “1952 was a real disappointment.”
Zott is clear about the problem. But (and this is where affirmative action and Title IX are particularly relevant), Zott is under the impression that she can make it on her own, without help from anyone. It’s a particularly American illusion, and one can’t help but admire how Zott uses the belief to prod herself into action. She won’t get married to her partner, a famous scientist that she loves and who adores her, because she doesn’t want special favors. When she lands a cooking show, she inspires women across the nation with her can-do spirit. At one point she tells her audience,
Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change – and change is what we’re chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others’ opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.”
This is all very well. But how can you make progress when the deck is stacked against you? Her partner is worried about her:
It was a form of naïveté, he thought, the way she continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure, grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help. But maybe because she’d never been offered any, she refused to believe in it.
He tries to lay this out for her, at one point observing that “life has never been fair, and yet you continue to operate as if it is—as if once you get a few wrongs straightened out, everything else will fall into place. They won’t.”
It’s not that Zott is unaware of the depth of the problem. At one point she acknowledges that the problems run deep, telling her television audience that
the reduction of women to something less than men, and the elevation of men to something more than women, is not biological: it’s cultural. And it starts with two words: pink and blue. Everything skyrockets out of control from there.
She also observes that if “a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon”—an observation that could be extended to a White Person being Black for a day.
This is what systemic sexism and racism looks like. But though Zott recognizes the problem, she thinks her own determination and smarts will help her triumph. That proves not to be the case. While her drive gets her a certain distance, time and again she succeeds only because others support her. Her partner secretly makes sure that their institute gives her the resources she needs, a neighbor comes to her rescue when she needs childcare, and a secret benefactor makes sure she can return to science after she leaves her television show.
Which is the whole point of affirmative action. Rather than propping up mediocrity, as its critics accuse, it makes sure that those who have been systematically deprived of support get the education they need to succeed. Clarence Thomas would not be a supreme court justice today if programs had not reached out to him, thereby ensuring that someone with his talents would be recognized. Thomas Gray lays out what could have happened without such programs in “Elegy on a Country Churchyard”:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Watching Zott, one can see why Thomas is dismissive of affirmative action. After all, if much of your drive comes from feeling that you need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps—that you must help yourself because there’s no one else to help you—then to be told that you succeeded only because others helped you feels like a slap in the face. Joy Reid, the brilliant MSNBC host who was interviewed the other night by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, said that when she got to Harvard thanks to affirmative action, she was told by other students that she wasn’t there on her merits.
But Reid, despite such putdowns, is not afraid to acknowledge that affirmative action was critical in her success, despite such putdowns. Thomas’s crime, as Hayes observed the other night, has been to pull up the affirmative action ladder after he himself made use of it.
Zott, one feels sure, will not do the same. Supportive of others, she reflects at one point,
Humans need reassurance, they need to know others survived in hard times. And unlike other species which do a better job of learning from their mistakes, humans require constant threats and reminders to be nice.
And allow me to expand this discussion from affirmative action and Title IX to cancel culture. The Washington Post recently had an article about three professors who lost their jobs because of remarks they made. The faculty argued that their free speech rights were violated and two got their jobs back (the third retired), but what struck me was how their biases could easily undermine their teaching effectiveness. If they see only a stereotype rather than a person in front of them, they cannot detect hidden strengths and abilities. I quote from the article to show how each is blinded by prejudice:
–Past controversies — such as one in which [Indiana University at Bloomington economist Eric] Rasmusen argued on a blog that gay men shouldn’t be hired as school teachers because they could prey on children — had faded from attention.
A tipping point came in 2019, when Rasmusen tweeted a link to an article titled “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably.” He highlighted a quote from the article, which claimed “geniuses are overwhelmingly male.”
–[S]he [a Black student of University of Central Florida psychology teacher Charles Negy] was disturbed by his suggestion that, “statistically speaking, minorities are just not as smart as other people.”
–In December 2020, the Jewish News of Northern California reported that the Twitter account of Abbas Ghassemi, a teaching professor in the engineering school at the University of California at Merced, was awash with antisemitic tropes. A cartoon diagram of the “Zionist brain” there depicted a “frontal money lobe,” a “Holocaust memory centre” and a “world domination lobe.” Another post said the interests of “Zionists and IsraHell” had “embedded themselves in every component of the American system,” including banking and media.
I doubt that these men offer much reassurance to students from the vulnerable populations they denigrate. And while the Clarence Thomases and Joy Reids, like Elizabeth Zott, succeed in spite of them, not all students are as strong. For some, feelings of inferiority become confirmed by such teachers and they become discouraged and underperform.
I can testify that I’ve seen many, many African American students from impoverished backgrounds succeed at my college and go on to live productive and prosperous lives. Affirmative action and supportive teaching were critical.
