Misinformation and Education
The first meeting of my Intro to Women's Studies course commenced yesterday. Before I walked through the door I assumed, wrongly so, that I would learn no new concepts in this class (I always feel like my brain is at the brink of exploding with conceptual diarrhea), and I would instead soak up all the factual information that I possibly could - which woman did ____, how many women went through ___, how many women died from _____. A pre-conception if there ever was one.
I suppose that the first thing I felt I could take away from the class (the FIRST class, so dayyuuum) and use in my spare with Republican dinner guest is the effect of misinformation on the conceptual.
The professor asked "Who was the first African-American to run for president of the U.S.?" Surprise! It wasn't Barack Obama. Surprise! It wasn't Jesse Jackson, although one woman sitting by me was pretty intent upon Jesse Jackson. Well, I knew it was Shirley Chisholm, 1972, on a few tickets across the US. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, k? You would assume this is the factual and not the conceptual? "Its another fact we can just pile on the fact-mobile." But it isn't just a fact that Shirley Chisholm was the first Black-American to run for president on a major-party ticket, nor is it only factual that she is a woman.
These are only facts:
Ants are social insects of the family Formicidae
Martha Washington was born on Chestnut Grove Plantation on June 2, 1731
The Walk Disney Concert Hall is located at 111 South Grand Avenue
These facts do little or nothing to the way(s) in which we conceptualize or re-conceptualize society. On the other hand, the fact that Shirley Chisholm was the first Black-American to run for president of the US on a major ticket and the fact that she is identified as a woman and the fact that she was a schoolteacher and the fact that she was the child of immigrant parents and the fact that she graduated from Brooklyn College- these are all facts that, when known, force us to vastly re-conceptualize what is generally accepted in society: racism, sexism, classism, and anti-Immigrantism.They force us to re-conceptualize because they blatantly contradict pre-conceived notions of society which we received when we were very young by seemingly authoratative adults.
Unfortunately, as I learned, the vast majority of the class, many of whom were Black and female, didn't know who Shirley Chisholm even was let alone that she ran for president in 1972. When I came to think about it, I learned about the damn thing on the Internet. Come to think of it, I've learned most things of importance on the Internet. So what did I learn in primary school:
George Washington was the first president of the United States
George Washington cut down a damn cherry tree
George Washington was a white, straight, Christian, war hero
I think the question at hand is: who does it empower to have access to this information? Further, how much did it empower the Black-American, Brooklyn College-educated, women with immigrant parents to learn this piece of information?
Does the phenomenon by which we are systematically denied information in primary school, which would otherwise help us contradict large racist, sexist, classist, and anti-Immigrantism structures, even have a name?
It does: Disinformation and Misinformation.
The Washington Post has an article:
"In experiments conducted by political scientist John Bullock at Yale University, volunteers were given various items of political misinformation from real life. One group of volunteers was shown a transcript of an ad created by NARAL Pro-Choice America that accused John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court at the time, of "supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber."
A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. People who did not like Roberts to begin with, then, ought to have been most receptive to the damaging allegation, and this is exactly what Bullock found.Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to disapprove of Roberts after hearing the allegation.Bullock then showed volunteers a refutation of the ad by abortion-rights supporters. He also told the volunteers that the advocacy group had withdrawn the ad. Although 56 percent of Democrats had originally disapproved of Roberts before hearing the misinformation, 80 percent of Democrats disapproved of the Supreme Court nominee afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval of Roberts dropped only to 72 percent."
For the 6 percent left with flexible thinking: Chisholm won three states, by the by.
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