{"id":15546,"date":"2017-06-24T10:30:10","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T17:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2017\/06\/24\/15546.html"},"modified":"2017-06-24T10:30:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T17:30:10","slug":"another-lesson-for-me-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2017\/06\/24\/another-lesson-for-me-on\/","title":{"rendered":"On the difficulty of recognizing one&#8217;s own biases"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Another lesson for me on the difficulty of seeing outside your own cultural context:<\/p>\n<p>In Delany's <cite>City of a Thousand Suns<\/cite> (1966), a historian (Rolth Catham) is talking about various people writing for their ideal audiences. During that discussion, he refers repeatedly to &ldquo;man&rdquo; (meaning humankind), and consistently uses &ldquo;he&rdquo; to refer to various ideal readers. I was noticing the genderedness of all that, so I was ruefully amused when he adds  (p. 158):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&ldquo;&#8230; I check and recheck my historical theory for cultural, sexual, emotional bias, for that ideal man, who is ideally unbiased.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>So despite checking his own work repeatedly for cultural and sexual bias, the character is oblivious to his belief that the ideal unbiased reader is a man.<\/p>\n<p>I don't, of course, bring this up in order to criticize Chip for something he wrote fifty years ago. I bring it up because I think it's another nice illustration of how hard it is to recognize our own cultural frameworks even when we're explicitly trying to avoid bias.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another lesson for me on the difficulty of seeing outside your own cultural context: In Delany&#8217;s City of a Thousand&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,47,11,27,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commonplace-book","category-gender","category-improving-society","category-speculative-fiction","category-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}