王兰

A 5-year-old girl in Georgia is being asked a series of questions in her school library. The girl, who is white, is looking at pictures of five cartoons of girls, all identical except for skin color ranging from light to dark. When asked who the smart child is, she points to a light-skinned doll. When asked who the mean child is she points to a dark-skinned doll. She says a white child is good because “I think she looks like me”, and says the black child is ugly because “she’s a lot darker.”

As we get closer to the hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, I expect we will have to endure yet another season of vulgar sexism. Sonia Sotomayor had to refute allegations that she was too strident and bossy; Kagan is already facing speculation that she’s a lesbian — in that unfortunate schoolyard universe where, as with Hillary Clinton before her, “lesbian” is defined only as “unwomanly.” This has nothing to do with Kagan’s actual sexual orientation, whatever it might be; rather, I believe it is testament to the work that remains to be done. Forty years after the birth of modern feminism, we are still not able to think about women who attain certain kinds of professional success as normatively gendered.

Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive psychologist at Stanford University, studies whether the languages we speak shape the way we think. She has showed empirically that lexical or syntactic differences affect how we think about objects or concepts. For example, in German the word for “bridge” is feminine; in Spanish, French and other Romance languages it’s masculine. Boroditsky has shown that in German, native speakers tend to describe bridges as elegant or beautiful, whereas Spanish or French speakers generally refer to a bridge in masculine terms: as strong and massive and muscular. They don’t just speak of the bridge as such — they think of it as such; they feel it as such.