Peanut Butter 1 is not Peanut Butter 2

What I learned from S.I. Hayakawa

Perhaps the single most significant concept that I took away from my four years in college was that cow 1 is not cow 2.

To be sure, I had a broad liberal arts education. It provided me with an excellent foundation for my career. But if I had to pinpoint one idea that has informed my intellectual life it would be this. That cow 1 is not cow 2 has informed my critical thinking and writing for over five decades. I’ll explain.

Most first year students at Dickinson College in 1963 were required to take Soc Sci 10 and 11. There were many complaints from my new classmates about its breadth. It covered political science, sociology, cultural anthropology and even cybernetics, with Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings.¹ One of the books assigned was Language in Thought and Action, by S.I. Hayakawa. The book is still in print. The author was a linguist, president of San Francisco State University, and, late in life and somewhat inexplicably, served a single term as a U.S. Senator.

Hayakawa’s premise is that the words we use often connate abstractions. But we can also use the same words to be very specific.

For example, instead of cow, consider “dog.” This refers to an animal we are all familiar with. All dogs have some commonality: four legs, head, body, ears, tail. We might generalize that dogs are “mans’ best friend,” that they are domesticated and so on. But “dog” is an abstraction. We can be less abstract when specifying a breed of dog: Greyhound is very different than Chihuahua. And we can be most specific when we point to an individual dog—this greyhound named Herman or that Labrador, Penny. Herman may be a different color than another greyhound. It may be able to run faster—or is slower, than that one. It may have been trained to sit on command—or not. Yet they are all, in the abstract, dogs.

So there is a “ladder,” explained Hayakawa, with steps that move between the most abstract to the most specific. Marketers understand this ladder, only they talk about market segments. Hormel Foods is the manufacturer of Skippy peanut butter. But their mission isn’t to sell you the abstraction: “peanut butter.”

They know there are segments of buyers who like smooth peanut butter, others who prefer chunky and yet others who want yet super chunky. Some want “natural” peanut butter. So Hormel must go further and sell their brand of smooth or chunky or natural. Thus, Hayakawa would say that peanut butter 1 is not peanut butter 2.

The essence of Hayakawa’s approach is constantly violated by many politicians. When a politician starts a sentence with “People want…” or “Americans believe…” they are implying that person 1 is the same as person 2 or American 1 the same as American n. We know that is not accurate. More accurate would be a few Americans. Maybe some Americans. Maybe many Americans. Even better would be some solid numbers: “Forty-two percent of Americans believe…”² But what about you or me. We’re not abstractions.

The tendency to label events such as white Minneapolis police officer Dennis Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, who was Black as a confirmation of systemic racism of white society blows apart when viewed through a Hayakawa lens.

John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, made this point in a New York Times opinion piece after another young Black man, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten and killed by five Black police officers in Memphis in January.

Thus, to understand the full tragedy of Tyre Nichols, it is important to ask hard questions about the culture and behavior of police officers — including grappling with the fact that whatever role race played in Nichols’s death, it was more complicated than the racist-white-cop-kills-Black-man framework into which we typically sort such horrific episodes.…

Much of the conversation about police violence in recent years has been through a lens focused on systemic racism, white cops and antiracism reform goals. But a man (or a woman) who is killed by a police officer merits our attention and response regardless of the race of either victims or killer. There has long been a theory afoot that hiring more Black cops would result in fewer shootings of Black civilians. But there is little evidence that this intuitive solution has any meaningful effect,,,,,

More than one study has suggested that the difference in likelihood between white and Black cops killing Black people is much smaller than one might suppose; expert observers on the subject regularly concur; and it is a commonplace in Black community discussions that one cannot necessarily expect any particular clemency from Black officers in tough situations. The Memphis Police Department is 58 percent Black and has a Black police chief; that did not prevent the horrific acts of violence perpetrated on Nichols.

It shouldn’t be relevant, but if you aren’t familiar with McWhorter, he is Black.

On the one hand, most of us are conscious of the danger of falling for stereotypes. Yet, so often we identify groups at a high level of abstraction that effectievly assumes a stereotype. There is a tendency to assume that all Blacks (or all Asians or all women, etc.) are a monolithic community. Among many examples one could find, is this article from a post on the Web site of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundations with the headline “Black and brown communities are determining their own futures.” The author asserts “it is evident that scarcity, fear, and victimhood of Black and brown people are transitioning into ownership of their futures.”

This might be well and good. But she writes at a very high level of abtraction. Is there one Black and brown communitiy? Are there separate Black and brown communities? Or are there, probably many communities, some of which some Blacks identify with and others may not. Same with brown “communities.” Or Jewish communities. Or LGBTQ+ communities.

At EmbraceRace, Divya Kumar, a “child of Indian immigrants growing up in white suburban Connecticut,” writes that she was the only brown kid in school.

My mother had this funny habit of always pointing out every other Indian-appearing child in any public place - “Look! There’s another Indian girl! Go and say hello to her; maybe you’ll make friends?” When I was a young child, I found it perplexing and didn’t understand why I would have anything in common with a random girl across the room. I would reply to my mother, “Just because she’s Indian doesn’t mean that we actually have anything in common!”

But the white world was making the same assumptions about her community:

I experienced microaggressions constantly; for example, the person taking tickets at the movie or seating folks at the diner nearly always assumed that I wasn’t “with” my group of white friends.

So the phenomenon of expected Indian girl 1 to be like Indian girl 2 may be found both within and outside an abstract group.

In many cases, if we bring discussions down from the ladder to the more specific we may be able to reduce polarization. I grew up in a neighborhood of red brick row houses that sprung up at the Western edge of Philadelphia after World War II. For reasons I can only speculate, the young families that moved in as street and after went up were overwhelming Jewish—maybe 90%. On my street, there was one Italian family, with a daughter close in age to my younger sister. The two girls became friends. One summer night, when my sister was maybe five or six, she came home and told my parents “L*** said she doesn’t usually like Jews, but I like you.”

In the context of this discussion, the friend had come way down the abstraction ladder and, at least, realized in her own way that Jew 1 is not Jew 2. I wonder if any of that insight carried over to later life.

I have no fantasy that Hayakawa’s framework is ready to be promoted as a blueprint to end sexism, racism, or about any ism. It would be helpful if we could base our value judgments as far down the abstraction ladder as is practical. It has certainly helped with my personal worldview.

1. I just recall it involved “entropy.”

2. We’ll assume they would cite a number from a valid source.