Itamar Vieira Junior and literary criticism in the sad tropics – 07/24/2023 – Michael França

It is normal to believe that we are impartial and give good reviews. That we only look at the quality of what we intend to evaluate. However, research suggests otherwise. It is difficult to focus on the criteria that really matter and, at the same time, eliminate all our biases, which are often implicit, in the evaluation processes.

The world of music brings an important teaching. In 1970, it is estimated that in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States the percentage of women was less than 5% of all musicians. In the 1970s and 1980s, several orchestras began to revise their hiring policies. Many of them began to use blind auditions to hide the identity of the candidate from the jury. As a result, the chances of women being admitted increased.

In the study “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians”, researchers Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse showed that blind auditions could explain up to 55% of the increase in the female proportion among new hires.

In football, the scenario is similar. It also seems to be a little different when we don’t see who’s playing. This is the conclusion of the study “Pace and Power: Removing Unconscious Bias from Soccer Broadcasts”.

The starting point of the work was to analyze the evaluation of those who supposedly understand football. It is common for commentators and experts to point out that white players are intelligent and that black players have physical qualities. At the 2018 World Cup, in the game between Poland, whose players were all white, and Senegal, a team that had only black people, the racial bias in the way commentators and the media evaluated the two teams was evident.

In this context, the researchers of the study sought to understand how the evaluations would be if we could not observe which team was playing. For this, they created a video with a rendering in which the players appeared as dolls and, therefore, it was not possible to identify the team.

In the experiment, for sports fans who watched the original video of the World Cup game, 70% rated Senegal as the “more athletic or faster” team. Interestingly, for those who only saw the animation and thus couldn’t see the players, 62% chose Poland as the most athletic team.

Such evidence should not be overlooked. For black players looking to become coaches, being associated only with fitness, not intelligence, is certainly something that puts them at a disadvantage.

In the world of books, minorities aren’t immune to bias either. The author of “Torto Arado” and award-winning writer Itamar Vieira Junior is a literary phenomenon. However, if it depended only on criticism, perhaps his fate would have been different. As highlighted by Paulo Roberto Pires, in 2021, in Quatro Cinco Um Magazine: “Itamar Vieira Junior’s book does not owe its success to judges or critics, but to irresistible word of mouth”. At the time, Pires argued that unanimity around the writer could generate a kind of “toxic cuteness” that would inhibit the debate on literature.

In fact, criticism is important for the development of any human being. Especially at a time when many are embracing issues that are difficult to defend. However, we must not forget that, even when we do not intend to, our natural tendency is to disproportionately penalize those who are already systematically penalized.

Several surveys suggest that the evaluation of works is usually inseparable from the figure of individuals. Prejudices, implicit or not, and other factors tend to come before the so-called intellectual rigor.

The title is a reference to the book “Tristes Trópicos”, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a tribute to the song of the same name, by Itamar Assumpção.

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