Looking and Seeing Revisited

Ages ago I put up a link to a clever advertisement about our inability to notice something really obvious, when we are focused on something else. It was made to point out the difficulty of spotting cyclists when you are driving your car and looking for larger moving objects, and it has since been circulated widely through the internets.

While the ad was created to make us think about traffic it also made me think about politics. Specifically the (many) times that I have noticed absences that haven’t always been apparent to others; a forum panel that lacks women, or coloured faces, or anyone under fifty; a television discussion about immigration that bats the subject back and forth between only those whose families immigrated a few generations ago, not recently; advertisements for nappies that never show a man with a child; a lecture where the MC is a woman, the speaker is a woman, but all the questions are asked by men; political blogs where white right-wing* men (mostly heterosexual) dominate and some come over all troll when faced with someone from outside their demographic.

Lyn has written recently about the impact of exemplars on encouraging those absent to become present. When you see someone like you doing something it becomes more feasible to see yourself in that role too. I read a Joanne Black column in the Listener a month or two back in which she bemoaned the announcement that NZ had its first female motorcycle cop. She felt that now that we were all equal this kind of thing was ridiculous and unnecessary – we should only mark firsts when it is the first person, regardless of gender. Yet this denies that actually there are many areas of life where women, and Maori, and the young, and Asians, and indeed men, are rare or non-existent.

If we want to have more women plumbers, or more male kindergarten teachers, or more Maori surgeons, or more young politicians, if we want to have a society that isn’t about putting people in a little box based on the Lotto of birth, then we need to notice when there are people missing. To see the absences we need to start looking for diversity. And then hopefully we will start seeing the barriers to participation too.



* There seems to be a particular type of right-wing in the NZ political blogosphere that is not actually all that representative of the vast majority of those who vote right-of-centre. It’s as if the right wingers who have hearts and souls (and some would add brains) haven’t discovered this part of Internet City, but their climate-change-denying, taxation-equals-theft-touting brethren have moved into the locality in droves. For evidence of this skewing of the Right you need only look at the results from some of Kiwiblog’s online polls.