Klarinet Archive - Posting 000238.txt from 1999/02

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausman@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Women and orchestras
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 23:26:47 -0500

At 05:21 PM 2/5/99 EST, DHmorgan wrote:
>In the study cited [forgive, but since I 'retired from race relations' I no
>longer has access to any thing other than my memory of it] the students
>subject matter was not subject to choice--they were proving a legal point
>assigned to them. The surprising, startling, unexpected and confounding
>result (and I think many people following this thread are in the grips of
this
>surprise) was that, while the law professors had no OBJECTIVE way of knowing
>the race/gender of the student, nonetheless, they were biased towards their
>group. We are not talking about objectively poor English, the use of slang,
>double negatives, or one student writing a paper about a polo match and the
>other sharing their mother's recipe for Gumbo! :-) We are talking about
very
>subtle hints--use of language, word choice, the way arguments are framed.
>
I think we may have crossed the line between bias and preference here. One
may PREFER to hear language (or music) used in a certain way and favor the
person who does so, and that is fine. To ASSUME that the person who does
or does not use it that way belongs to a particular group is BIAS. I can
listen to Darth Vader's voice for a whole movie and never have it cross my
mind that the true source of it is a black man. The diction does not fit
the stereotype (bias). MANY people do not fit MANY stereotypes, like the
person on the list recently (I'm sorry, I forgot who) who was told she
played clarinet "like a man." This is why racial, gender, etc.
discrimination is wrong. It causes decisions to be made on invalid
information. But a decision based solely on PERFORMANCE, even if, upon
further study, it turns out that the performance differences have an ethnic
(gender, etc.) basis, is still valid.

Bill Hausmann bhausman@-----.com
451 Old Orchard Drive http://www.concentric.net/~bhausman
Essexville, MI 48732 http://members.wbs.net/homepages/z/o/o/zoot14.html
ICQ UIN 4862265

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is too loud.

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