Cultural phobias and statistics

These days, it can be hard not to hear statistics about rates of culturally influenced “phobias” such as homophobia and Islamophobia in the news — especially with recent controversies such as those surrounding the death of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi or the comments made by news analyst Juan Williams on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

When faced with such statistics, it can be hard to understand the first-person experience of being the target of prejudice. Particularly, it can be deceptively easy to think of statistics as “low” or showing a trend toward acceptance when the reality of being faced with the hatred and bias of the people behind those seemingly low statistics can be overwhelming.

Take, for example, the following hypothetical:  

You live in a university town in the Midwest. You’re gay.  

If we’re being generous and saying that 90 percent of the population at large is not homophobic, we’ll say that in the relatively liberal university town in which you live, 99 percent of the population is not homophobic.

That gives us one seemingly measly percentage point of phobic prejudice. Doesn’t sound like a lot, does it?

But keep following.

You walk to class every day holding hands with your significant other. You pass, let’s say, approximately 200 people. Of those 200 people, at least two will glare with unmasked disdain.

In a semester, you encounter around 160 glares. In a year, that makes 320 hurtful moments. And that’s if you only walk outside on school days.

What does that add up to in a lifetime?

I don’t have the numbers, but I’ll estimate that it’s more than an insignificant amount of perceived hatred.

The hypothetical isn’t perfect; they never are. But maybe it gives you a taste of what it means to think of statistics in the first person.

Maybe you have features that are commonly associated with the Middle East. Maybe you wear your hair tied up in a headscarf. Maybe you just happen to be reciting your Arabic lessons while waiting for a flight.

In a given day at the airport, you might pass 1,000 people. If 10 percent of the population is Islamophobic, that’s 100 glares in just one day. And believe me, that’s an understatement of what really happens.

Statistics are not first-person experiences. They often struggle to even correlate with them, much less explain or predict them.

Statistics of things such as homophobia and Islamophobia might seem low at first glance, but the number of people that any given person encounters day to day can make such low percentages as 1 percent and 10 percent add up astonishingly fast in terms of experience.  

When you include the psychology of dealing with the sheer relentlessness of repeated moments of dejection, you might even come a little closer to understanding what it means to be gay or to be Muslim in a society such as ours that has a “small” percentage of cultural phobia.

So before you find yourself impressed with the idea that 90 percent of America is tolerant, think of what that 10 percent can mean for a person who has to face prejudice every day.


E-mail: cmcglass@indiana.edu