The Interrupter

During a conversation with C in a hallway after lunch, he yelled at me, "Stop interrupting me! You're always interrupting!" 

I didn't think I had interrupted him, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I shut up and he continued speaking .... 

... and he kept on talking. His monologue was mostly one long sentence. 

Was I "always interrupting"? Or had he merely thrown a tantrum to get his way, so he could talk and not have to listen to me? I decided to treat it as a scientific experiment, and glanced at my watch to check the time.

When he finally finished his long sentence, which went on for more than 20 minutes, I tried to rejoin the "conversation". He immediately interrupted me, so I shut up again and waited.

C wasn't a close colleague. He worked at the IBM lab where I had a "postdoctoral and junior faculty" fellowship in 1988-89, and we occasionally sat at the same lunch table. I no longer remember what topic he was expounding on, but I remember that it wasn't something about which he knew more than I did.

At an infinitesimal lull, I spoke up to calmly say, "I'm very sorry to interrupt, but I've been politely listening to you for the past half hour. Whenever I think you're done and I try to say something, you start talking again, so I stop. When do I get to speak?"

He berated me angrily for having timed his monologue, before I politely excused myself and walked away.

I mentioned our interaction to a colleague, who reassured me that it was him and not me. He was known for being hard to get along with.

From similar experiments, I've observed that the people who angrily tell me that I'm monopolizing the conversation usually speak for more time than I do.

Alice in Wonderland spent much of her adventures trying to deal calmly and rationally with angry, irrational, unreasonable creatures, mostly older men. Sometimes I feel as if that accurately describes my career.

When I'm tempted to react in anger (in my personal life or at work), I try to remember to take some deep breaths, channel Alice in Wonderland, and say to myself:

"First, self-confidence; then kindness." 

When I succeed, it's the self-confidence that enables me to be kind.

And if I do take the floor for too long, I hope that you'll let me know kindly rather than angrily.

The Affirmative Action We Don't Talk About

I know of a cohort that was chosen (from paper applications without interviews) by a well-intentioned selection committee that tried to put together a racially and ethnically diverse group. The cohort turned out to be more homogeneous than the selection committee assumed. The women with Spanish surnames were non-Hispanic white women who got their last names from their ex-husbands. And the group included whites who were assumed to be black because of their work on African or African American topics.

In the United States, race-based affirmative action was originally supposed to help underprivileged African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans who faced a history of discrimination. The way I've seen it implemented in academia is sometimes at odds with those goals. But when some of the problematic aspects are discussed at all, it's often in whispers. Is this too dangerous a topic to talk about openly?

I've noticed that surprisingly often, the people who benefit from affirmative action are well-off white men from Spain or Latin America who didn't come to the United States until graduate school, or else people who aren't black or Hispanic but are assumed to be. They are usually valuable members of their workplace (who might or might not serve as role models, depending on the situation). But they are not the underprivileged Hispanic Americans or African Americans for whom affirmative action was intended.

If you question such choices, even to point out that more qualified African Americans and women were passed over, you risk being accused of racism for questioning an affirmative action decision.

Many years ago I heard from my father the journalist an anecdote about a radio station that got in trouble for discriminating against minorities. A consequence was that the station had to hire a minority applicant for the next job opening. Of the two finalists, the African American applicant was better. The other one was hired. 

The people who ran the radio station reasoned that one couldn't tell from the black applicant's name or voice that he was black, so they wouldn't "get credit" for hiring a minority member.

The applicant they hired grew up as a white kid in an upper middle class white suburb. He used an Hispanic name when he applied for this job to take advantage of affirmative action. Even though he didn't grow up in an Hispanic culture and didn't know Spanish, the radio audience would think from his name that he was Hispanic, and that's what mattered to the bosses at the radio station.

Implementing only the letter and not the spirit of affirmative action policies is sometimes just laziness. Whatever your views about affirmative action, I hope you agree that we can do better.