Why Looks Are the Last Bastion of Discrimination.

After reading the three articles this week and our novels up to this point, it is evident that
discrimination can take many forms. It is not just limited to race. In her article, Deborah L.
Rhode states that “The Constitution bars discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion,
national origin, and ethnicity” (246). However, many people are pre-judged or
discriminated against solely based on their appearance, which is referred to as lookism.
Essay Prompt:
1. Have you ever been discriminated against based on your race, sex, sexual
orientation, religion, national origin, ethnicity, or appearance (lookism)?
2. Compare and contrast yourself to the people from this week’s readings,
compare characters from the readings to each other, or do both. Ultimately,
the essay’s thesis will let me know what direction your essay will be headed.
The thesis will be the road map for the entire essay.
3. In your body paragraphs, you may want to describe an incident from one of the
readings and use an in-text citation and then compare or contrast that incident
to yourself. This is using a point-by-point format for completing this essay. This
is the way I would do it, but this is just a suggestion. You can write in any way or
structure you would like.
Requirements:
1. This paper must be at least 4-7 pages in length or at least 1000 words. This does
not include the Works Cited page.
2. Include at least four in-text citations. At least three should come from different
sources. Of these three sources, at least two of them must come from the four
readings below. You may use outside sources, but, again, at least two of them
must come from the assigned readings below.
3. Follow the MLA format for heading and title. No running header is required.
Readings:
1. Deborah L. Rhode,”Why Looks Are the Last Bastion of Discrimination”from
Patterns begins on page 239.
2. Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Use any of the chapters from
the novel that you have read so far.
3. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Use any of the chapters from the novel that
you have read so far.
4. Judith Ortiz Cofer, “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria”
from Patterns begins on page 225.
The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria
On a bus trip to London from Oxford University where I was earning some
graduate credits one summer, a young man, obviously fresh from a pub, spotted me
and as if struck by inspiration went down on his knees in the aisle. With both hands
over his heart he broke into an Irish tenor’s rendition of “Maria” from West Side
Story.* My politely amused fellow passengers gave his lovely voice the round of
gentle applause it deserved. Though I was not quite as amused, I managed my
version of an English smile: no show of teeth, no extreme contortions of the facial
muscles — I was at this time of my life practicing reserve and cool. Oh, that British
control, how I coveted it. But “Maria” had followed me to London, reminding me of
a prime fact of my life: you can leave the island, master the English language, and
travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so
obviously belongs to Rita Moreno’s** gene pool, the island travels with you. This is
sometimes a very good thing — it may win you that extra minute of someone’s
attention. But with some people, the same things can make you an island — not a
tropical paradise but an Alcatraz, a place nobody wants to visit. As a Puerto Rican
girl living in the United States† and wanting like most children to “belong,” I
resented the stereotype that my Hispanic appearance called forth from many
people I met. Growing up in a large urban center in New Jersey during the 1960s, I
suffered from what I think of as “cultural schizophrenia.” Our life was designed by
my parents as a microcosm of their casas‡ on the island. We spoke in Spanish, ate
Puerto Rican food bought at the bodega,§ and practiced strict Catholicism at a
church that allotted us a one-hour slot each week for mass, performed in Spanish
by a Chinese priest trained as a missionary for Latin America. As a girl I was kept
under strict surveillance by my parents, since my virtue and modesty were, by their
cultural equation, the same as their honor. As a teenager I was lectured constantly
on how to behave as a proper senorita. But it was a conflicting message I received,
since the Puerto Rican mothers also encouraged their daughters to look and act
like women and to dress in clothes our Anglo friends and their mothers found too
“mature” and flashy. The difference was, and is, cultural; yet I often felt humiliated
when I appeared at an American friend’s party wearing a dress more suitable to a
semi-formal than to a playroom birthday celebration. At Puerto Rican festivities,
neither the music nor the colors we wore could be too loud. I remember Career
Day in our high school, when teachers told us to come dressed as if for a job
interview. It quickly became obvious that to the Puerto Rican girls “dressing up”
meant wearing their mother’s ornate jewelry and clothing, more appropriate (by
mainstream standards) for the company Christmas party than as daily office attire.
That morning I had agonized in front of my closet, trying to figure out what a
“career girl” would wear. I knew how to dress for school (at the Catholic school I
attended, we all wore uniforms), I knew how to dress for Sunday mass, and I knew
what dresses to wear for parties at my relatives’ homes. Though I do not recall the
precise details of my Career Day outfit, it must have been a composite of these
choices. But I remember a comment my friend (an Italian American) made in later
years that coalesced my impressions of that day. She said that at the business
school she was attending, the Puerto Rican girls always stood out for wearing
“everything at once.” She meant, of course, too much jewelry, too many
accessories. On that day at school we were simply made the negative models by
the nuns, who were themselves not credible fashion experts to any of us. But it was
painfully obvious to me that to the others, in their tailored skirts and silk blouses,
we must have seemed “hopeless” and “vulgar.” Though I now know that most
adolescents feel out of step much of the time, I also know that for the Puerto Rican
girls of my generation that sense was intensified. The way our teachers and
classmates looked at us that day in school was just a taste of the cultural clash that
awaited us in the real world, where prospective employers and men on the street
would often misinterpret our tight skirts and jingling bracelets as a “come-on.”
Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes — for example, that of
the Hispanic woman as the “hot tamale” or sexual firebrand. It is a one-dimensional
view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary,
advertisers have designated “sizzling” and “smoldering” as the adjectives of choice
for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America. From
conversations in my house I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto Rican
women endured in factories where the “boss-men” talked to them as if sexual
innuendo was all they understood, and worse, often gave them the choice of
submitting to their advances or being fired. It is custom, however, not
chromosomes, that leads us to choose scarlet over pale pink. As young girls, it was
our mothers who influenced our decisions about clothes and colors — mothers who
had grown up on a tropical island where the natural environment was a riot of
primary colors, where showing your skin was one way to keep cool as well as to
look sexy. Most important of all, on the island, women perhaps felt freer to dress
and move more provocatively since, in most cases, they were protected by the
traditions, mores, and laws of a Spanish/Catholic system of morality and machismo
whose main rule was: You may look at my sister, but if you touch her I will kill you.
The extended family and church structure could provide a young woman with a
circle of safety in her small pueblo on the island; if a man “wronged” a girl, everyone
would close in to save her family honor. My mother has told me about dressing in
her best party clothes on Saturday nights and going to the town’s plaza to
promenade with her girl friends in front of the boys they liked. The males were thus
given an opportunity to admire the women and to express their admiration in the
form of piropos: erotically charged street poems they composed on the spot. (I
have myself been subjected to a few piropos while visiting the island, and they can
be outrageous, although custom dictates that they must never cross into
obscenity.) This ritual, as I understand it, also entails a show of studied indifference
on the woman’s part; if she is “decent,” she must not acknowledge the man’s
impassioned words. So I do understand how things can be lost in translation. When
a Puerto Rican girl dressed in her idea of what is attractive meets a man from the
mainstream culture who has been trained to react to certain types of clothing as a
sexual signal, a clash is likely to take place. I remember the boy who took me to my
first formal dance leaning over to plant a sloppy, over-eager kiss painfully on my
mouth; when I didn’t respond with sufficient passion, he remarked resentfully: “I
thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early,” as if I were expected to
ripen like a fruit or vegetable, not just grow into womanhood like other girls. It is
surprising to my professional friends that even today some people, including those
who should know better, still put others “in their place.” It happened to me most
recently during a stay at a classy metropolitan hotel favored by young professional
couples for weddings. Late one evening after the theater, as I walked toward my
room with a colleague (a woman with whom I was coordinating an arts program), a
middle-aged man in a tuxedo, with a young girl in satin and lace on his arm, stepped
directly into our path. With his champagne glass extended toward me, he
exclaimed “Evita!”* Our way blocked, my companion and I listened as the man
halfrecited, half-bellowed “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” When he finished, the
young girl said: “How about a round of applause for my daddy?” We complied,
hoping this would bring the silly spectacle to a close. I was becoming aware that our
little group was attracting the attention of the other guests. “Daddy” must have
perceived this too, and he once more barred the way as we tried to walk past him.
He began to shout-sing a ditty to the tune of “La Bamba” — except the lyrics were
about a girl named Maria whose exploits rhymed with her name and gonorrhea.
The girl kept saying “Oh, Daddy” and looking at me with pleading eyes. She wanted
me to laugh along with the others. My companion and I stood silently waiting for
the man to end his offensive song. When he finished, I looked not at him but at his
daughter. I advised her calmly never to ask her father what he had done in the
army. Then I walked between them and to my room. My friend complimented me
on my cool handling of the situation, but I confessed that I had really wanted to
push the jerk into the swimming pool. This same man — probably a corporate
executive, well-educated, even worldly by most standards — would not have been
likely to regale an Anglo woman with a dirty song in public. He might have checked
his impulse by assuming that she could be somebody’s wife or mother, or at least
somebody who might take offense. But, to him, I was just an Evita or a Maria:
merely a character in his cartoon-populated universe. Another facet of the myth of
the Latin woman in the United States is the menial, the domestic — Maria the
housemaid or countergirl. It’s true that work as domestics, as waitresses, and in
factories is all that’s available to women with little English and few skills. But the
myth of the Hispanic menial — the funny maid, mispronouncing words and cooking
up a spicy storm in a shiny California kitchen — has been perpetuated by the media
in the same way that “Mammy” from Gone with the Wind became America’s idea of
the black woman for generations. Since I do not wear my diplomas around my neck
for all to see, I have on occasion been sent to that “kitchen” where some think I
obviously belong. One incident has stayed with me, though I recognize it as a minor
offense. My first public poetry reading took place in Miami, at a restaurant where a
luncheon was being held before the event. I was nervous and excited as I walked in
with notebook in hand. An older woman motioned me to her table, and thinking
(foolish me) that she wanted me to autograph a copy of my newly published slender
volume of verse, I went over. She ordered a cup of coffee from me, assuming that I
was the waitress. (Easy enough to mistake my poems for menus, I suppose.) I know
it wasn’t an intentional act of cruelty. Yet of all the good things that happened later,
I remember that scene most clearly, because it reminded me of what I had to
overcome before anyone would take me seriously. In retrospect I understand that
my anger gave my reading fire. In fact, I have almost always taken any doubt in my
abilities as a challenge, the result most often being the satisfaction of winning a
convert, of seeing the cold, appraising eyes warm to my words, the body language
change, the smile that indicates I have opened some avenue for communication. So
that day as I read, I looked directly at that woman. Her lowered eyes told me she
was embarrassed at her faux pas, and when I willed her to look up at me, she
graciously allowed me to punish her with my full attention. We shook hands at the
end of the reading and I never saw her again. She has probably forgotten the entire
incident, but maybe not. Yet I am one of the lucky ones. There are thousands of
Latinas without the privilege of an education or the entrees into society that I have.
For them life is a constant struggle against the misconceptions perpetuated by the
myth of the Latina. My goal is to try to replace the old stereotypes with a much
more interesting set of realities. Every time I give a reading, I hope the stories I tell,
the dreams and fears I examine in my work, can achieve some universal truth that
will get my audience past the particulars of my skin color, my accent, or my clothes.
I once wrote a poem in which I called all Latinas “God’s brown daughters.” This
poem is really a prayer of sorts, offered upward, but also, through the
human-to-human channel of art, outward. It is a prayer for communication and for
respect. In it, Latin women pray “in Spanish to an Anglo God/with a Jewish
heritage,” and they are “fervently hoping/that if not omnipotent,/at least He be
bilingual.
Why Looks Are the Last Bastion of Discrimination
In the nineteenth century, many American cities banned public appearances by
“unsightly” individuals. A Chicago ordinance was typical: “Any person who is diseased,
maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting subject .
. . shall not . . . expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of $1 for each
offense.” Although the government is no longer in the business of enforcing such
discrimination, it still allows businesses, schools and other organizations to indulge their
own prejudices. Over the past half-century, the United States has expanded protections
against discrimination to include race, religion, sex, age, disability and, in a growing
number of jurisdictions, sexual orientation. Yet bias based on appearance remains
perfectly permissible in all but one state and six cities and counties. Across the rest of the
country, looks are the last bastion of acceptable bigotry. We all know that appearance
matters, but the price of prejudice can be steeper than we often assume. In Texas in 1994,
an obese woman was rejected for a job as a bus driver when a company doctor assumed
she was not up to the task after watching her, in his words, “waddling down the hall.” He
did not perform any agility tests to determine whether she was, as the company would
later claim, unfit to evacuate the bus in the event of an accident. In New Jersey in 2005,
one of the Borgata Hotel Casino’s “Borgata babe” cocktail waitresses went from a Size 4
to a Size 6 because of a thyroid condition. When the waitress, whose contract required
her to keep “an hourglass figure” that was “height and weight appropriate,” requested a
larger uniform, she was turned down. “Borgata babes don’t go up in size,” she was told.
(Unless, the waitress noted, they have breast implants, which the casino happily
accommodated with paid medical leave and a bigger bustier.) And in California in 2001,
Jennifer Portnick, a 240-pound aerobics instructor, was denied a franchise by Jazzercise,
a national fitness chain. Jazzercise explained that its image demanded instructors who are
“fit” and “toned.” But Portnick was both: She worked out six days a week, taught
back-to-back classes, and had no shortage of willing students. Such cases are common. In a
survey by the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, 62 percent of its
overweight female members and 42 percent of its overweight male members said they
had been turned down for a job because of their weight. And it isn’t just weight that’s at
issue; it’s appearance overall. According to a national poll by the Employment Law
Alliance in 2005, 16 percent of workers reported being victims of appearance
discrimination more generally — a figure comparable to the percentage who in other
surveys say they have experienced sex or race discrimination. Conventional wisdom holds
that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but most beholders tend to agree on what is
beautiful. A number of researchers have independently found that, when people are asked
to rate an individual’s attractiveness, their responses are quite consistent, even across
race, sex, age, class, and cultural background. Facial symmetry and unblemished skin are
universally admired. Men get a bump for height, women are favored if they have hourglass
figures, and racial minorities get points for light skin color, European facial characteristics,
and conventionally “white” hairstyles. Yale’s Kelly Brownell and Rebecca Puhl and
Harvard’s Nancy Etcoff have each reviewed hundreds of studies on the impact of
appearance. Etcoff finds that unattractive people are less likely than their attractive peers
to be viewed as intelligent, likable, and good. Brownell and Puhl have documented that
overweight individuals consistently suffer disadvantages at school, at work, and beyond.
Among the key findings of a quarter-century’s worth of research: Unattractive people are
less likely to be hired and promoted, and they earn lower salaries, even in fields in which
looks have no obvious relationship to professional duties. (In one study, economists Jeff
Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh estimated that for lawyers, such prejudice can translate to
a pay cut of as much as 12 percent.) When researchers ask people to evaluate written
essays, the same material receives lower ratings for ideas, style, and creativity when an
accompanying photograph shows a less attractive author. Good-looking professors get
better course evaluations from students; teachers in turn rate good-looking students as
more intelligent. Not even justice is blind. In studies that simulate legal proceedings,
unattractive plaintiffs receive lower damage awards. And in a study released this month,
Stephen Ceci and Justin Gunnell, two researchers at Cornell University, gave students
case studies involving real criminal defendants and asked them to come to a verdict and a
punishment for each. The students gave unattractive defendants prison sentences that
were, on average, 22 months longer than those they gave to attractive defendants. Just
like racial or gender discrimination, discrimination based on irrelevant physical
characteristics reinforces invidious stereotypes and undermines equal-opportunity
principles based on merit and performance. And when grooming choices come into play,
such bias can also restrict personal freedom. Consider Nikki Youngblood, a lesbian who in
2001 was denied a photo in her Tampa high school yearbook because she would not pose
in a scoopnecked dress. Youngblood was “not a rebellious kid,” her lawyer explained. “She
simply wanted to appear in her yearbook as herself, not as a fluffed-up stereotype of what
school administrators thought she should look like.” Furthermore, many grooming codes
sexualize the workplace and jeopardize employees’ health. The weight restrictions at the
Borgata, for example, reportedly contributed to eating disorders among its waitresses.
Appearance-related bias also exacerbates disadvantages based on gender, race, ethnicity,
age, sexual orientation, and class. Prevailing beauty standards penalize people who lack
the time and money to invest in their appearance. And weight discrimination, in particular,
imposes special costs on people who live in communities with shortages of healthy food
options and exercise facilities. So why not simply ban discrimination based on
appearance? Employers often argue that attractiveness is job-related; their workers’
appearance, they say, can affect the company’s image and its profitability. In this way, the
Borgata blamed its weight limits on market demands. Customers, according to a
spokesperson, like being served by an attractive waitress. The same assumption
presumably motivated the L’Oreal executive who was sued for sex discrimination in 2003
after allegedly ordering a store manager to fire a salesperson who was not “hot” enough.
Such practices can violate the law if they disproportionately exclude groups protected by
civil rights statutes — hence the sex discrimination suit. Abercrombie & Fitch’s notorious
efforts to project what it called a “classic American” look led to a race discrimination
settlement on behalf of minority job-seekers who said they were turned down for
positions on the sales floor. But unless the victims of appearance bias belong to groups
already protected by civil rights laws, they have no legal remedy.
As the history of civil rights legislation suggests, customer preferences should not be a
defense for prejudice. During the early civil rights era, employers in the South often
argued that hiring African Americans would be financially ruinous; white customers, they
said, would take their business elsewhere. In rejecting this logic, Congress and the courts
recognized that customer preferences often reflect and reinforce precisely the attitudes
that society is seeking to eliminate. Over the decades, we’ve seen that the most effective
way of combating prejudice is to deprive people of the option to indulge it. Similarly,
during the 1960s and 1970s, major airlines argued that the male business travelers who
dominated their customer ranks preferred attractive female flight attendants. According
to the airlines, that made sex a bona fide occupational qualification and exempted them
from antidiscrimination requirements. But the courts reasoned that only if sexual allure
were the “essence” of a job should employers be allowed to select workers on that basis.
Since airplanes were not flying bordellos, it was time to start hiring men. Opponents of a
ban on appearance-based discrimination also warn that it would trivialize other, more
serious forms of bias. After all, if the goal is a level playing field, why draw the line at looks?
“By the time you’ve finished preventing discrimination against the ugly, the short, the
skinny, the bald, the knobbly-kneed, the flat-chested, and the stupid,” Andrew Sullivan
wrote in the London Sunday Times in 1999, “you’re living in a totalitarian state.” Yet
intelligence and civility are generally related to job performance in a way that appearance
isn’t. We also have enough experience with prohibitions on appearance discrimination to
challenge opponents’ arguments. Already, one state (Michigan) and six local jurisdictions
(the District of Columbia; Howard County, Md.; San Francisco; Santa Cruz, Calif.;
Madison, Wis.; and Urbana, Ill.) have banned such discrimination. Some of these laws date
back to the 1970s and 1980s, while some are more recent; some cover height and weight
only, while others cover looks broadly; but all make exceptions for reasonable business
needs. Such bans have not produced a barrage of loony litigation or an erosion of support
for civil rights remedies generally. These cities and counties each receive between zero
and nine complaints a year, while the entire state of Michigan totals about 30, with fewer
than one a year ending up in court. Although the laws are unevenly enforced, they have
had a positive effect by publicizing and remedying the worst abuses. Because Portnick, the
aerobics instructor turned away by Jazzercise, lived in San Francisco, she was able to
bring a claim against the company. After a wave of sympathetic media coverage,
Jazzercise changed its policy. This is not to overstate the power of legal remedies. Given
the stigma attached to unattractiveness, few will want to claim that status in public
litigation. And in the vast majority of cases, the cost of filing suit and the difficulty of
proving discrimination are likely to be prohibitive. But stricter anti-discrimination laws
could play a modest role in advancing healthier and more inclusive ideals of
attractiveness. At the very least, such laws could reflect our principles of equal
opportunity and raise our collective consciousness when we fall short.

Why Looks Are the Last Bastion of Discrimination

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