Subjectivity in the Life of a White Man

I've written numerous times before about the role that subjectivity and beliefs about objectivity play in our lives, our attitudes, and the choices we make.  I've been trying to make the case for a while now that the proliferation of communication and perspectives that appear in digital media are creating a broader cultural recognition of subjectivity, and that this is a good thing!  When I hear hateful, prejudicial, closed-minded conversations, I always go back to the idea of subjectivity; I've felt for a long while that most of the hateful, horrible things that happen in our world wouldn't happen if everyone were fully aware of the layers of interpretation that sit in between them and the "objective reality" they think they're looking at.

image from the Oatmeal.

I had an amazing conversation with a friend last weekend that really shook up all my thinking around this question, and I just had to share it.

To understand the full context, you need to know a few things - first, that I'm a white male from a suburban, protestant background, and second that her parents (and I think she as well) are first generation immigrants from Thailand.  She is female, she is non-white, and she is Catholic, different from me in all of the major demographic measures, and different from the politically economically dominant subgroup in our culture of which I am a member.

As I was explaining my ingenius theories about subjectivity to her, I could see the skepticism written all over her face, and the result was a heated discussion that brought me to a point of significant realization.  My ideas about subjectivity have grown out of my own subjective experience as a white male.  I grew up in an environment where it was easy for me to identify with the images and symbols that surrounded me.  That wasn't her experience at all; as long as she could remember, she's been confronted by the fact of difference and by messages that made her question both the ways she looked at the world and the way the world was presented to her by her teachers, the media, and the broader cultural zeitgeist.

Long story short, I'd been walking around assuming that nearly all people were locked into this delusion of objectivity from which they needed to be liberated, without realizing that millions of members of minority populations (or populations that have disproportionately small economic/political influence) have been living out the tensions between their own subjective experiences and the "objective" world for their entire lives.

I don't really know what to do with this, but it does give rise to two interesting thoughts.

1. I wonder if this is particularly true in America, because of its particular cultural and political history
2. This seems like the best argument for diversity in representation in decision-making, in companies, in government, in all aspects of life.  The concentration of political power in the dominant group makes achieving diversity a significant challenge, but we'll all be much better off if we consider institutional solutions to incentivize diverse perspectives.