Shattered Glass and The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

There is a simple fact of human nature that we all need to understand if we are to move forward as a functioning and productive society. If you tell someone that they are capable of more than they think they are, they tend to excell in pursuit of that higher standard you set for them. The converse is also true… if you tell someone that they are weak or that they are a victim of a system that is designed to make them fail, or that they have no hope of achieving excellence, they will believe you and they will fail.

Every time.

We have used the knowledge of this technique to train generations of athletes and soldiers, doctors and lawyers, astronauts and writers… those who become the best in their fields tend to be those who are driven to continuously test their personal limits, and then exceed them… “you are capable… you can be better than you are… you have not reached your limit… keep fighting…” these are the exhortations of our best teachers and coaches… those who understand how to use human nature to encourage the men and women in their charge to excell.

Twenty years ago I was a serious high altitude mountaineer… I had a dream that one day I might attempt Everest. One of the steps on the road to that goal was a summit attempt on Alaska’s Denali (20,310 feet). In those days I climbed with a partner and on one of our early climbs pre-Denali he said something that has always stuck with me. He said “no matter how strong you are, you’re going to have a day on every mountain where you feel like you’re done… that you can’t take another step… at that point you either quit, or you just say ‘fuck it’ and keep going.”

The crux of the West Buttress route on Denali is the move from the big camp at 14,000 feet up to high camp at 17,000. This is the most difficult and most technically challenging part of the climb because it begins with an imposing feature known as “The Headwall”… a thousand foot, nearly vertical wall of ice and snow. As we roped up into teams that morning and began our traverse across the flat plain of 14,000 camp towards the bottom of the Headwall, I suddenly felt it in my bones… I just didn’t have it that day… my “bad day” had come, and at almost the worst possible time.

I managed to force myself up the Headwall, but by the time we hit the long knife-edged ridge that leads from the top of the Headwall to High Camp, I was done. I fell down on both knees in the snow and knew… just knew… that I would not be taking another step that day.

And here’s where the power of high standards comes in. Things like sporting events or mountaineering are ruthless enforcers of high standards because they provide an objective measure of success… did you win the game or not? Did you summit the mountain or not? At high altitude, a rope team is a delicately balanced thing. Everyone must perform, or no one does. It’s a lot of pressure… no one can carry you up the mountain, and since everyone is operating at the very peak of their physical endurance, the failure of one team member can mean the failure of the entire rope team. And in a world where everyone on your team has taken a month off from work and invested a minimum of $10,000 in the goal of making it to the top, well…

As I sat there in the snow one of our guides, a guy named Dave, came over and sat down next to me on the ridge. He put an arm around my shoulders and said ‘George, I’ve been watching you climb for two weeks, you’re a strong climber. You can make it.” Then he stood up and walked away.

Well… I sincerely hope Dave has since gone on to a long and successful career in motivational speaking because that was exactly what I needed. I needed to be reminded of the standard for success on Denali, and I needed someone to tell me that I could meet that standard. That’s all.

I got up and I resolved to just keep putting one foot in front of another until I either got to High Camp or was dead… I wasn’t about to let Dave see something in me that I couldn’t see myself. And oh my god, did it suck. I can’t remember being that exhausted before or since. But I got there, by god, one step at a time. I did something that only a couple hours ago I did not believe was possible, and I did it because someone held me to a higher standard than the one to which I was willing to hold myself. I thought my tank was empty, but it wasn’t, and I could not have learned that there was still some fuel in there without Dave’s gentle reminder of what was at stake.

The world needs more Daves… but unfortunately, what it’s getting instead are more people like Marquette Journalism Professor Dr. Ayleen Cabas-Mijares.

Dr. Cabas-Mijares argued in a long Thursday Tweet storm that high standards in historically white professions like Journalism create unusual levels of stress and anxiety for employees of color and should therefore be relaxed… so that… minority Journalists can be free to make up all the bullshit stories they want without having to worry about getting fired… I guess?

Well…

I’m not going to use the “R” word here because it’s already modern society’s most overused accusation, but just about the nicest thing you can say about her argument is that it’s insulting. She’s telling you that white aspirants to professional success can handle high standards of performance while aspirants of color cannot. That is the very foundational fact of her argument… and it’s patently ridiculous.

For one thing, the most famous defiler of Journalistic Standards was a white guy named Stephen Glass. Glass was the John Wick of destroying journalistic standards… he destroyed them over-and-over, everywhere he saw them, like Wick killing his way through the Continental Hotel. Surely you’ve heard of Stephen… his was a pretty famous case… they even made a movie about it… it had movie stars in it and everything.

But in the end, all Stephen Glass wound up doing was disgracing himself and The New Republic. Given that we live in a world where journalists seem intent on embarrassing themselves and their publications or networks on a daily basis (see also: Taylor Lorenz and Felicia Sonmez, for example), as far as stakes go, here in 2022 Glass’ crimes seem like small potatoes.

But when it comes to pure damage done, perhaps no one Journalist empitomizes the criticality of Journalistic Standards better than Walter Duranty, who proved that when the Press gets it wrong, people can die… sometimes by the millions.

In the 1930’s Walter Duranty (also a regular ole white guy, by the way) filled the pages of the New York Times with Soviet propaganda masquerading as hard news. And in doing so, he made himself a crucial tool of a regime that eventually murdered as many as a hundred million Russians. We have no contemporaneous accounts to tell us whether or not it was the “pressure to perform” which influenced Duranty’s decision to shatter jounralistic standards in pursuit of a “good story”… but we do know this… Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize sits unmolested in the Times’ trophy case to this very day.

Journalistic standards aren’t just rules by which employees know what they must do in order to keep from getting fired by their paper, they are critical to a free Press and an absolute requirement for any functioning Democracy. There are real stakes here beyond whether or not a woman “from a minoritized community” gets to keep her job. If folks can’t trust the Press, and there is already ample evidence that most of us do not, we are in dire straits.

And the craziest part of the argument is that “don’t make shit up” isn’t even a particularly high bar for a young Journo to clear. I’d be willing to bet it’s the Eight O’Clock: Day One lesson in J School. But Dr. Cabas-Mijares seems to think it’s so esoteric as a rule of thumb that our mainstream media outlets need to do a better job of mentoring “don’t make shit up” into their employees of color.

You’ve probably seen a viral cartoon making the rounds on social media these days which purports to show the difference between “equality” and “equity.”

It’s brilliant agitprop. But like most things in the world of Social Justice, it’s agitprop that massages all the right emotional erogenous zones while completely ignoring the reality of a complex world.

I’m a charitable sort of guy and so I’m not going to ascribe nefarious motives to Dr. Cabas-Mijares’ tweet storm. Instead I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she genuinely believes she’s helping. She believes that minority Journalists-in-training are like the two kids on the right, cursed through no fault of their own with the disability of short stature, who will never grow taller, and who are therefore in need of assistance to see over the fence. She believes that by tweeting out her support for relaxed Journalistic standards she is doing the rhetorical equivalent of finding those poor disadvantaged kids some boxes to stand on.

But while she’s treating everyone in the minority Journalist community like a kid, the uncomfortable truth is that many of them are more like the adult on the left. They already have all the strength and talent and smarts required to succeed in Journalism, they just need to keep working at it to get bettter, within a strict framework of journalistic professionalism.

And that’s the biggest problem with Dr. Cabas-Mijares’ argument… she has it exactly backwards. She wants you to believe that Journalistic Standards are unfair because they create stress… to which the only logical response is… “YES! of course they create stress… that is, in fact, the entire point of the exercise!”

Have you ever heard the saying “iron sharpens iron”? It’s a saying used to describe how highly competitve environments make all the participants in a given endeavor better… a boxer doesn’t get better fighting lesser opponents… he gets better by fighting superior opponents. Industry Standards that create competitive professional stress perform the same basic function… they push people to get better. And human beings need that push. Most of us are unable to excell unless we are regularly pushed out of our comfort zones… and there isn’t a self-help book anywhere on Amazon that won’t tell you the same damned thing.

But not Dr. Cabas-Mijares… her plan is to run around telling minority journalists that they are somehow lesser than their white counterparts… that they can’t hack it in the real world of Professional Standards. Rather than testing their limits and then working hard to exceed them, she would rather minority Journalists give up on getting better and spend their time looking for someone to hand them a box to stand on.

And yeah, I know I said we weren’t using the “R” word today, but I dunno… seems pretty racist to me.