SUBTEXTup with a very clever project which illustrates the point. Mina
Chow, a young Korean-American girl who attended Cardozo High
School in New York City, noticed that teachers base a lot of
grades on a student's image, on what students look like. Mina
originally looked like a typical "punk" kid with spiked hair and
blue lipstick. Her grades were slipping until she decided on an
image change. She toned herself down to a more average appear-
ance, and her grades went up. "I figured that the teachers' percep-
tions had a lot to do with it," Mina realized.
Mina elaborated on her own perceptions for a science project.
She collected "neutral" pictures of black, white, and Asian stu-
dents, male and female, and distributed them along with a question-
naire to eighty-seven teachers in New York City high schools.
The results scored a big point for the subtext behind image
projection. Asian students were rated highest for motivation, blacks
the lowest. Blacks were rated highest for physical activity, Asians
the lowest. Mina concluded that Asians might do better in school
simply because teachers had preconceived notions about them.
We all carry preconceived notions around with us. Certainly,
in an ideal world, we would judge people by what they do, not
by their race or clothes or social status, but this is not an ideal
world, and we judge others by the images they project.
Nowhere is this more true than in television. In 1987, during
the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Robert H. Bork for
the U.S. Supreme Court, John Dancy, a TV correspondent, said
of the Bork hearings, "The wind blows from the image." According
to John Corry, the New York Times television critic, Judge Bork
"looks like a Reform rabbi, and speaks like an Oxford don." He
went on to note that Bork's constitutional interpretation is "as
interesting as origami folding. How one looks, however, is some-
thing else. Appearance is what counts."