The bias you have when you don't know you have it

(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, January 9.)

At the end of each year, dictionaries like to highlight significant new words or phrases that have entered the English language over the previous 12 months.

The Collins English Dictionary declared “single-use” its word of the year for 2018, a year when disposable plastic supermarket bags became a symbol of wasteful consumerism and environmental harm.

Observant readers will note that “single-use” is actually two words, but then so was “fake news”, which was Collins’ word of the year for 2017.

The Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2017 was “youthquake”, which was defined as “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people”.

Oxford’s lexicographers chose it because of the role young voters played in that year’s British general election, which nearly delivered an upset victory for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Corbyn’s brand of cloth-cap socialism struck a chord with the impressionable young, who are not old enough to know that socialism always turns out badly.

Oxford’s choice for the year just ended was “toxic”, a word that cropped up in a variety of contexts. We had toxic relationships, toxic cultures, toxic waste, toxic chemicals and “toxic masculinity” – a feminist label for appalling male behaviour as perpetrated by the likes of Harvey Weinstein.

It can be seen from the above examples that the word of the year typically reveals something about the mood of the times. Others included “Brexit” (Collins, 2016) and “post-truth” (Oxford, same year).

Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to my own word of the year – except that, like Collins, I’ve cheated and gone for a phrase that consists of two words.

My phrase of the year is “unconscious bias”. This is something you’re guilty of if you’re white and middle-class, and more so if you’re male, able-bodied and heterosexual.

If you tick those boxes, you are automatically considered to hold an unconscious bias against people who are none of those things – in other words women, people of colour, people who identify as gay, lesbian or trans-gender, and those with disabilities.

At least this is what we’re told by people who promote the concept of unconscious bias. And we just have to accept that they must be right, because the essence of unconscious bias is that you don’t know you have it.

Most New Zealanders may think of themselves as fair-minded, tolerant and full of goodwill toward their fellow human beings, but those who accuse them of unconscious bias know better. They know that beneath our smug complacency, most of us seethe with malice and are determined to maintain our status in society by crushing those less privileged.

The genius of the phrase “unconscious bias” is that people who are accused of harbouring it can’t deny it, because by definition they’re unaware of it. They are expected to stare shame-facedly at the floor and admit they’re guilty even though they never realised it.

In fact the act of denying guilt may serve to confirm it. At a seminar on hate speech last year, I heard one speaker assert that “the heartbeat of racism is denial”. In other words, if you deny you’re racist, you probably are. In this topsy-turvy, Kafka-esque world, you’re condemned either way.

While logic dictates that there probably is such a thing as unconscious bias, I believe its grip on society is grossly overstated, the aim being to heap guilt and shame on white middle-class people so that they meekly comply with activists’ demands for special treatment of supposedly oppressed minority groups.

Of course, unconscious bias wasn’t the only new term we had to get our heads around in 2018. Another was the adjective “woke”, which derives from “awake” and came into common usage as a result of America’s Black Lives Matter movement. If you’re “woke”, you’re alert to racism and social justice issues.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the political insult du jour is to call someone a gammon.  An English term for ham, gammon is used to refer to pale-skinned men on the conservative side of politics who supposedly resemble pigs.

“Gammon” is closely related to the phrase “stale, pale and male”, which was also frequently heard in 2018.  All other stereotypes based on sex, age and skin colour are strictly forbidden, but older white men are the one demographic group that it’s okay – in fact almost mandatory – to disparage.

But at least this ideological contradiction throws up the occasional humorous irony, as exemplified by the impeccably “woke” Auckland columnist who wrote a furious rant about pale, stale males only months after turning 60 himself.

Either it was an unconscious expression of self-loathing, or he somehow imagines he’s been sprinkled with fairy dust which renders him magically exempt from the label.

Male, pale and stale - a despised minority

(First published in The Dominion Post and on stuff.co.nz, May 31.)

I am writing this column as a member of a despised minority. I will be 68 next birthday. I’m fair of skin and male of sex.

To put it another way, in the language of “progressive” millennials and people who, with no sense of irony, describe themselves as liberals, I’m male, pale and stale. 

There is no more crushing condemnation in the 21^st century political lexicon. To be male, pale and stale is to be racist, sexist, bitter and selfish. Don Brash and Sir Bob Jones are prime examples of this wretched form of humanity. I am too, albeit of a lower order of celebrity.

It goes without saying that I can’t help being old. I can no more control the ageing process than I could dance the prima ballerina’s role in Swan Lake. Neither did I have any say over my ethnicity or sex.

Perhaps if I’d been born six decades later I might have been encouraged to decide for myself what gender I wanted to assume and to alter my sexual identity at will, regardless of physiology. But I’ve been a bloke all my life and it’s a bit hard to re-invent myself at this point in my life cycle.

Having said that, I’ve been happy being a male and never felt any desire to have it any other way. Nor have I felt ashamed about it, which is not to say I’m not regularly appalled by the behaviour of some of my fellow blokes.

Moreover, I don’t hate or fear women and have never felt that I was in competition with them, still less perceived them as a threat. So I’m not sure that I deserve the implied accusation that men like me are by definition misogynistic.

The women who have been closest to me throughout my life have been stroppy and strong-willed. If I preferred women to be submissive, I’ve been either desperately unlucky or spectacularly unwise.

But never mind all that. I’m stuck with being a bloke, just as I’m stuck with my skin colour and my inexorably advancing age. Yet I, and others like me, now find ourselves regularly being pilloried for having the temerity to express an opinion about things. It seems we’re expected to shut up.

Let’s unpick that phrase “male, pale and stale”. The first thing you notice is that it explicitly criticises people on the basis of their skin colour.

Ah, but that’s okay, because we’re white. And as I heard a moronic talkback host assert recently, only minority groups – i.e. non-whites – can be subject to racism.

You can forget all that warm, inclusive talk on the Left about celebrating diversity. The embrace of diversity mysteriously stops short of ageing white blokes. We’re the one demographic cohort against whom it’s permissible – in fact fashionable – to display undisguised and often venomous bigotry.

In any other context, attacking people on the basis of their age, sex and skin colour would be labelled a hate crime, but no one should expect the Human Rights Commission to take up our cause.

Being white and male, we are seen as being in a position of power and therefore unscathed by discrimination and immune to insult. And if we are discriminated against, we’re expected to suck it up because … well, because we deserve it.

Ageing white males are considered fair game because we’re seen as having enjoyed privilege for too long. Now the tables have turned and we’re expected to pay the penalty by keeping our supposedly rancid opinions to ourselves. 

This treats freedom of expression as a zero-sum game where one person’s right to speak can only be achieved by silencing someone else. But that’s not how free speech works.

In any case, if white males dominated newspaper opinion columns in past decades, as has been alleged, then any imbalance has been more than redressed. The media today is awash with comment that uncritically embraces the “progressive” agenda (there’s another word that’s used with no sense of irony) and sneers at anyone who stands in its path.

Am I pleading for sympathy here? Not a bit. We curmudgeonly tuataras can look after ourselves. All I’m doing is highlighting the double standards of social justice warriors who shriek with outrage at any perceived slight against a favoured minority group, but pile in for the attack when it’s an old white bloke who’s on the ground getting kicked.

One last thought. Today’s angry social justice warrior has a funny way of turning into tomorrow’s crusty reactionary.

One day the people who rant about ageing white men will themselves become old, and they can’t discount the hideous possibility that they too will morph into conservative dinosaurs, because by then they might have learned a few things about life, politics and the human condition.