@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-05-22 13:02:36
To give some examples:
When police get vastly differential results at investigating crimes against some groups (e.g., Black women) vs. others (e.g., white men), that's malcompetence. Probably plenty of simple malice involved too, and probably the whole gamut of mechanisms I mentioned in the last post are involved here.
Another example, from my own experience: when I stumble over the names of my non-white students but pronounce my white students' names flawlessly, that's malcompetence on my part, because the net effect of my selective incompetence is to make some students feel less welcome in my classroom, which hurts their learning. I'm my case, the reasons for the incompetence are not conscious nor (I think) unconscious malice, but instead a differential capability picked up from a certain kind of upbringing and then (sometimes) insufficiently mitigated by capability-building effort. Because of how I grew up, my ability to pronounce different names is biased (this is true of everyone in the world; most people don't have a classroom instructor position that causes it to matter so much). When I'm successful at mitigating my malcompetence, I use practice time with student intro videos to pare down my competence gap for the specific students in my class. This is time consuming (several hours per week for the first few weeks of classes) and I'm sad to admit that I don't always invest that time. But it's a great example of malcompetence because I have a introspective access to it.
