Signs of Intelligence

A short time ago I listened again to someone else complain about Dubya's speech followed by the inevitable commentary about his intelligence and it made me think about a few things that I'll share here.

1) I communicate well in English, be it through verbal or written means. I can carry on basic conversations in Spanish and Hebrew as well. But I am fairly awkward in both languages. Just because I speak poorly should I be concerned that people think I am stupid.

I regularly pass for being Israeli/Latino, but it is clear that I speak Hebrew/Spanish with an American accent. Does having an accent make me sound less intelligent? Or is there a bias against people who have a Southern drawl. FWIW, I can affect a mighty fine drawl of my own.

2) Do you think that someone who is deaf is less intelligent because they cannot communicate with you through conventional means?

3) If someone is mute, are they automatically stupid?

Some people might think that these questions are ridiculous, but I am willing to bet that there is a large chunk of the population that hasn't considered any of this. This is not meant to serve as a defense of Bush, but as a basic exercise to consider how you view certain people and situations.

I have been guilty of judging people based upon their communication and not upon substance. Have you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You and I differ politically, but one of the things I have admired about your blog is that you try so hard to be balanced and to look at things fairly. That can be a rare quality in both liberals and conservatives.

Jack Steiner said...

Thanks anonymous, whomever you are. It is hard to be happy when you stake your life on one side or the other. The truth often is in the middle.

I don't want to fight about everything, so I try to pick and choose the battles that are truly important to me.

Gail said...

You're welcome. I commented previously under "anonymous" because I was being asked for a password and I was too lazy to sign up for one. Today I realized that I actually had a blogger account already. Blogger makes commenting very complex.

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