Deficit Thinking

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I received this book last October 6, 2017. I ordered it from Amazon. Flipped through it and left it among the piles of books since then.

Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking (Valencia, 2010)

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These last few days I was not at the laptop. 

I had bleeding in half of the right eye.  Looked very serious but no pain Alhamdulillah. I have been to the doctor earlier. And yesterday to an eye-specialist for follow-up, because the healing was looking not too good. Alhamdulillah. Not too worry. It would take a couple of weeks to resolve, the good doctor said.

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Husband said. Stop the computer for a while.

I did. 

But picked up the book instead and have been digging into it for awhile.

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Deficit thinking.

Let me illustrate its meaning through some real life examples.

Example 1: An engineering graduate is told by the HR director that she is not suitable for the post because the Agency wants a male. Ladies would not be able to fulfil their field duties when they are married and pregnant.

Example 2: Orang Asli students fail in school because they are poor, lazy, parents are not involved, attitude problem. So most research say. 

Example 3: Girls should not be encouraged to memorise the Quran Kareem because when they get married and be busied by their children they will not have the time to review. And they would forget.

No no no. I did not make the above up. You can read about it here.

An excerpt from the article ...

“… and that’s why women shouldn’t memorize the Quran.” What did he just say? I had just finished memorizing the Quran myself that year, so I sat up in my seat. “My sister memorized the Quran,” he continued, “but she’s been so busy with her newborn baby that she never has time to review it, and now she’s forgotten it all. So it’s better for women not to memorize because they won’t be able to retain it while raising children.” (Tesneem Alkiek)

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Deficit thinking is a social construction that is flavoured by three contemporary discourses.

1. the genetic pathology model - the belief that we are naturally disadvantaged by who we are genetically ... being a female one cannot be as good an engineer, a black is less intelligent than a white (a prevalent implicit as well as explicit belief in the USA ... see JP Rushton for example) 

2. the culture of poverty model - the belief that failure is due to being poor. Students failure are linked to family's poverty.

3. the 'at-risk' model - the belief that some are culturally to be more at-risk to fail than others ... a married woman will have no time to review her memorisation of the Quran Kareem ... or when students are lumped into at-risk category because of who they are are.

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The key idea is that deficit thinking gives rise to 'blame the victim' culture. 

It's your fault that you can't get the job because you are female.

It's your fault that you failed because your family is poor and can't afford tuition, and your parents are too busy eking out a living to teach you at home.

It's your fault that you risk failing because you speak 'Greek' at home, and you can't follow the lessons taught in the Martian language in class. 

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This is more common than we think.

Think about the many incidents when we had this sudden inclination to blame the victims (the individuals themselves, their families, their culture, their language, etc.) for what have happened. 

Did our thinking process sound like any of the examples above?