If the phrase “object permanence” doesn’t mean anything to you, then you probably haven’t spent much time lately sprawled on the floor next to an infant.
My granddaughter has, among the phalanx of educational toys vying for her attention, an object permanence box, which is basically a wooden cube, a little smaller than a square Kleenex box, with a hole in the side. Colorful cloths are tucked into the hole and disappear. Then they’re pulled out of the box, and reappear. Voila!
Why is this important? Let me pull a few lines from a recent academic paper:
“Knowing that objects continue to exist when they cannot be directly observed or sensed is called ‘object permanence.’ This fundamental cognitive skill is important for working memory and allows us to form and retain mental representations of objects.
“For example, when a ball rolls under a couch and out of sight, infants who have object permanence understand that the ball exists. They may persist in attaining the ball by moving their body in various ways to look for and reach it even though it is hidden from view.”
Wobbly object permanence skills is why peek-a-boo is so entertaining for very young children. The beloved grandma mysteriously vanishes behind a wall of hands and then — peek-a-boo! — she magically appears, out of nowhere! It’s great fun.
Once mastered, object permanence stays with a person. Your keys fall into the couch, you retain an idea of where they might be — between the cushions — and look for them. You don’t shrug and forget the keys exist.
But object permanence is failing at the highest levels of government, where the current administration seems convinced that if certain narratives, or group of persons, are hidden from view, then they — and the challenges they present to whatever homogeneous white straight society they obviously hope to build — magically vanish.
Does violent racism constitute a significant thread throughout American history? Delete a few web sites, scrap a few plaques and — presto chango! — never happened. Our kids are back to learning about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
Do trans people trouble you? So vexing, what shall we do about high school girls swim meets? The Trump administration is vigorously trying to scrub trans people from public life — from passports, from the military. Medical care they need to live their lives is being criminalized.
In July, the Trump administration ordered the LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline shut down, an astoundingly callous act.
One of Trump’s first acts was an executive order defining Americans as male or female at birth, an “incontrovertible reality.”
Not according to nature it isn’t. I could fill the rest of the column with animals and plants that swap gender, under certain conditions. People, too.
Protections for students, for housing and the workplace, are scrapped. Which does not reduce by one the number of trans students, or those seeking housing or holding jobs. What it does do is make their lives less visible and thus more perilous.
They are excluded but not erased. The ball is still there, hidden.
The idea of object permanence was proposed by the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, a giant in early childhood development, who summed up our situation perfectly.
“What we see changes what we know,” Piaget said. “What we know changes what we see.”
The government understands that, obviously, which is why they’re trying to eliminate people and concepts they don’t like.
Because if you see trans people — or immigrants, even those lacking the right stamp on their papers — you know they are still people, despite their categories, and act accordingly.
If you never see them, unless in a negative light cast by pliant MAGA media, you can pretend they’re hardly human at all, more like mere things that can be shoved into a box and forgotten.
That doesn’t actually work, long term. Not with trans folk. Not with immigrants. We can send ICE into every city to start plucking off the street all the brown people they can grab, shipping them to prisons in El Salvador. A horrific, illegal, cruel, unsupportable policy that brave Americans oppose on every block.
But when it’s over, we will still be a diverse nation, with citizens living across the gender spectrum, a nation with a sizable and growing Hispanic population. Further from the dignity of being embraced by the society that lured them out, or here, with its appearance of opportunity and a bunch of hoo-ha about fairness and freedom that our government refuses to apply equally.
The ball doesn’t vanish just because you put it in a box. I get that. You get that. How come the Trump administration can’t seem to grasp the concept? Perhaps they weren’t given enough educational toys as children.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
