If taking the oath to the Queen was a ‘lie,’ how is the nature of the lie changed by the location in which you uttered it?
PROF’S ‘EXPERIMENT’ MALIGNED A SHOW THAT WAS MORE SENSITIVE ABOUT RACE AND GENDER THAN MUCH TV BEFORE OR SINCE
AN OATH DOESN’T NEED A CAMERA LENS TO MAKE IT BINDING.
— COLBY COSH
AToronto Star column posted online recently suggests those who have been warning of the death of rigour in the social sciences have not been exaggerating: A University of Toronto associate professor of sociology has written about an academic “experiment” she conducted, which consisted of her wearing a baseball cap for two weeks and doing her best to act like a fictional character from a teen television drama that has not been on the air for eight years.
When I read the piece, I couldn’t pin down which part was the most crazy making: That the associate professor, Judith Taylor, was jumping to sweeping conclusions about society based on a weird bit of playacting conducted by a self-selected sample of one; or that Taylor was misrepresenting and maligning one of television’s most worthwhile characters, Coach Eric Taylor, played by actor Kyle Chandler for five seasons on the lovable — if not always subtle — television show Friday Night Lights.
The point of Prof. Taylor’s experiment, such as it was, was to understand the “durable power and sway” of “white male swagger.”
“I decided to try to be as ‘Coach Eric Taylor’ as possible for two weeks,” Taylor wrote.
For any kids out there, please note that this is not a very satisfactory example to use as a template for the “experimental procedure” portion of a science experiment. Generally, the idea of a fair test is changing a single factor at a time, keeping every other factor the same. As lame as it still would have been, Prof. Taylor might have more convincingly approximated a useful experiment by changing one thing about her usual behaviour and noting the reactions.
She instead chose to change as much as she could about herself to “effect male power”: she showed up late at meetings; she told students they couldn’t have alternatives to their assignments; she drank beer!
And what happened next, according to Prof. Taylor, proved what a disaster white male privilege is — “students were more productive, and I was more effective at getting what I want.” I know, I know. This doesn’t sound like a disaster. But Taylor was certain this was a very bad thing. Not only was acting like a swaggering man less exhausting than her usual mode of being (apparently extreme fatigue is a healthy and necessary sign of inclusivity and deference), the potency of affecting the Coach Taylor demeanour supposedly proved that it entailed “the silencing of dissent through verbal muscularity.”
But, let’s be honest. As absurd and tuition-wasting as Prof. Taylor’s game was, even more upsetting was what a hit job she did on Coach Eric Taylor in her piece.
“Rageful, monosyllabic, sentimental about alcohol, and used to being in charge” is how she described Taylor (in an out-of-nowhere comparison of the fictional coach with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh).
That is not the Coach Taylor quarterback Jason Street knew when the coach comforted the paralyzed young player and made sure he heard how much respect the coach had for him. That is not the Coach Taylor that the coach’s wife, Tami, knew when the two went through ups and downs in a lovely depiction of an unusually respectful, equal, and communicative marriage.
Indeed, considering that he was a football coach in a (fictitious) Texas town that was obsessed with high school football — and more specifically with winning high school football — Coach Taylor had an unexpectedly healthy attitude about achievement.
He told Vince Howard, a promising player the coach mentored while dad was in prison and his mom was on drugs, “I said you need to strive to be better than everyone else. I didn’t say you needed to be better than everyone else. But you gotta try. That’s what character is. It’s in the try.”
When she chose Coach Taylor as an example of how southern American white men are universally “disrespectful” and “unflinching in the face of others’ pain,” Taylor made the biggest mistake of her “experiment.”
She noted Coach Taylor’s trademark idiom “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose,” then snidely dismissed it with one word (“Indeed”), implying that the saying shows how Taylor and white male Americans only care about their own power and coming out on top.
The expression shows nothing of the kind; it’s an inspirational reminder that coming out on top — beating the other guys — isn’t the most important thing, or even important at all. What matters is being present, having faith in yourself, and doing the absolute best you can do for who you are in that moment. If you do that, it doesn’t matter what the score is. You’ve already won. It’s in the try.
Maybe Prof. Taylor’s next experiment should be watching all five seasons of Friday Night Lights while pretending to understand how much more sensitive and probing the show is about issues of race, sex and masculinity than much television before or since.