The End of Bias: A Study of Prejudice and How It Can Be Eliminated

 I decided to read The End of Bias by Jessica Nordell because I wanted to see what Nordell had to say about the nature of prejudice, and how it could be eliminated.

                                    

 

Nordell says that she believes that people like seeing stereotypes confirmed because they are predictable, and we like seeing our predictions come true.  I must be the exception.  I find the predictable uninteresting.  I also think that it's tragic for people to behave stereotypically.  It seems to me that they must be prisoners of those stereotypes.  People aren't stereotypes.  They are individuals.  Stereotypical behavior is inauthentic. 

In ancient times the Greeks had prejudices about Northern Europeans.  Hippocrates wrote that the cold climate of Northern Europe made people pale and "dimwitted".  He also said that the hot sun of Africa darkened the skin, and made Africans very intelligent by drying out their "humors".  (There were four humors according to the ancient Greeks.  I found a page about them at Four Humors.)This means that Africans were considered superior by the ancients.

This book deals briefly with how African slavery began.  In the early 15th century, slaves came from Slavic countries.  The word "slave" came from sclavus which meant "of the Slavic people".  When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, slaves could no longer be obtained from Eastern Europe.  It was then that the African slave trade began, and the idea that Africans were a "race" arose.  The American colonies inherited the idea of race due to racialized slavery at the same time.

A later topic that was covered in The End of Bias was police being encouraged to practice mindfulness meditation.  Research into mindfulness meditation has shown that practitioners have less race and age biases.  

Police sergeant Cheri Maples from Wisconsin attended a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh.  Maples asked how she could be non-violent while carrying a gun.  "Who other than a person acting mindfully, the teacher asked, would we want carrying a gun?"  I'd say that Maples' police department sent her to a meditation retreat, so that she could be mindful while carrying a gun.

There is a very bizarre case of sex discrimination included in The End of Bias.  A 1980's study on the effect of obesity on breast cancer and uterine cancer excluded women because men's hormones were "simpler" and "cheaper" to study.  So I was wondering how they managed to study men's uterine cancer. Perhaps it had escaped the attention of those running the study that a man doesn't have a uterus?

We learn from The End of Bias that mathematicians are mainly male and either White or Asian.  Latino Andrés Vindas-Melendez was told by an advisor at  the University of California at Berkeley that he wouldn't ever be mathematician.  This would seem to be a field of study where bias is rampant.

In a study, some students were given a test by a person with a blank t-shirt and others were given a test by a person wearing a t-shirt with ERACISM on it. The author tells us that "The point was to suggest that the slogan wearer was anti-racist."  Yet to me "eracism" is ambiguous.  The "e" could stand for "end" which would be unconventional, or it could stand for "electronic" which would mean online racism.  It's fairly common for the "e" prefix to mean electronic.  So I would tend to read the t-shirt as referring to electronic racism.  I would wonder whether the t-shirt wearer was in favor of electronic racism or wanted to end it. It's an ambiguous t-shirt. 

 The conclusion states that reducing individuals' bias won't do anything to end social inequalities.  Yes, that's systemic and continues among populations where individual bias is frowned upon. I think that social inequalities requires political action.  Actually, dismantling systemic social inequalities would involve numerous political actions.  Social inequality is the sum of decisions made over the course of history, and would take time to undo.  It would probably also involve conflict with the forces that benefit from social inequality who are powerful individuals and institutions.  That's quite a bit of work to do, and it's not for the timid. Yet mentioning the work that needs to be done is a beginning.

Double Blind: A Police Procedural by Libby Fischer Hellmann

 I was sent a copy of  Double Blind by publicist Wiley Saichek for review. It's the sixth in the Georgia Davis series by Libby Fischer Hellmann. This is a very contemporary thriller that includes the Covid epidemic.  Several people died after receiving the Covid vaccine.  It was the same batch of the vaccine, and the doctor who was responsible had vanished.  This is the case that is under investigation in Double Blind.

                                     

                                  

PI Georgia Davis apparently has had no call for her services since the pandemic began.  I find this odd.  If people are confining themselves to their homes to avoid catching Covid, they can't investigate anything for themselves.  So they would be even more likely to call on someone who routinely runs that risk for a living.

There is another viewpoint character named Eden in Double Blind who is an abused Mormon wife. I found discussion of verbally abusive Mormons online.  To be fair to the Church of the Latter Day Saints, they do have a policy against all forms of  abuse. Readers shouldn't consider Eden's husband a typical Mormon.  In fact, I would consider him a very poor example of a human being. 

One of the locations where this novel takes place is Nauvoo, Illinois.  As someone who studied Hebrew, I would like to point out that Nauvoo does not mean beautiful place in Hebrew.  That would be makom yafeh. It's mentioned in this book that Mormonism founder Joseph Smith gave Nauvoo its name.   I wasn't astonished that Joseph Smith was not an authority on Hebrew.

 Georgia had hospital scrubs because an ICU nurse had given them to her mother when she was in the hospital in order to prevent her from getting an infection.  This bothered me. It sounds only semi-plausible.  The ICU nurse would get in trouble for providing scrubs to a hospital patient because scrubs identify people as staff providing patient care.  There are ways to prevent patients from getting an infection without breaking hospital protocol. 

Even more unlikely was Georgia somehow stumbling on the office of a hospital supervisor whose help she needed.  In a large hospital like this one, accidentally finding the right supervisor is too much of a coincidence.  Supervisors aren't in public hospital directories either.  I don't think that supervisors are supposed to be readily accessible to anyone but authorized personnel. 

Since I largely read this book  at times when I wasn't busy, I had moments of plot or character confusion.  I had to page back in the novel or run searches on characters. Readers of this review need to know that  I didn't have a continuous reading experience.  I'm certain that this influenced the way I view the book.

I think that the way I read Double Blind caused me to feel that it was less dramatically intense than it might have been under other circumstances.  I urge readers to make their own decisions about this novel.