Southern Living

I have a very good friend who is otherwise intelligent, charming, articulate and delightful in virtually every way, but she has (I believe) a hole in her vision that is incomprehensible to me.

As background, she is from New England, a fact she is inordinately proud of. She's also an enormous Red Sox fan, a statement that's probably redundant. She moved to the South 6 months ago because a friend from the same area who moved here a couple of years ago convinced her to give teaching and this city a try. I'm from the South, but have lived in many different regions of the country. When I lived in New Jersey, I was ridiculed for my accent, and assumed to be stupid because of how I said the words "five" and "nine". I can't recall my office phone number from a year ago, but I still remember my phone number in Morristown, NJ, 38 years ago: 539-9039. Lots of 5's and 9's.

Anyway, today she told me a story about her fear of taking the English portion of the general knowledge exam for teacher certification, and how her friend had assuaged her fear by noting that of course the vocabulary of Southerners is much smaller than that of educated people from the Northeast, and since the exam is geared for people from this (Southern) state, she (as a non-Southerner) had nothing to worry about. She thought this was a funny story that she'd share with me. I was apoplectic.

It occurred to me that there's an analogy one may use when deciding if a story like that is appropriate: Imagine you replace "Southerner" with "African-American," and "Northeasterner" with "white person" in the story above. "You have nothing to worry about, because black people have smaller vocabularies than whites." Would that be okay to say? Would anyone be offended? Would the black man with a good vocabulary to whom you're telling the story be offended? Should you be surprised if he is?

She then went on to say, "Well, you have to admit things are different here. Like, I would never have had to wait 2 days to get a call back from a Northeastern doctor, like I did with the one I went to here." Analogously, "I would never have to wait 2 days to get a call back from a white doctor, like I did with the black one I went to." It is a sentence I guarantee she would never utter, and one she'd be shocked to hear coming from anyone else.

So, to put some mathematics content into this post, I am reminded of "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott. Flatlanders are sentient polygonal shapes occupying two-dimensional space, and they have no notion that there might be a third dimension. They can't imagine where it could be, because their universe consists of a plane. (Think 'infinitely long and wide piece of infinitesimally thin paper', not 'flying machine with passengers and a pilot'.) One Flatlander (A. Square, by name), is visited by a 3-dimensional being, who shows Mr. Square the wonders of one-, two- and three-dimensional worlds. Square then notes that there are probably higher dimensions as well, going off in directions unimagined by 3-dimensional beings, just as the 3rd dimension was unimaginable to a 2-dimensional being. As I recall, the 3-dimensional being immediately dismisses this idea as ridiculous.

The point, and the reason my conversation with my friend reminded me of "Flatland", is that analogies are easy to see until they start bumping up against your own version of reality. It makes me wonder what version of "black people have smaller vocabularies than whites" I espouse without recognizing the inherent bigotry.