February 4th, 2015
Hey, how are ya?
My last post was built around the idea that there are two primary barriers to realizing greater equality in an organization, a community, or a society: 1- People that do not want or believe in equality, and 2- The rest of us. Then I went on to focus on the second group and to challenge the faulty binary idea that bad people are biased and good people are not, as in fact all human beings are biased and judgmental. Those of us in the second group believe in equality, but still contribute to inequality, through our behaviors and decisions which are not always in alignment with our beliefs.
Now I want to talk a bit about the first group, those that do not want or believe in equality. I used to think that this was a pretty small segment of the population in this country, and then 2014 happened. Call me naïve, call me delusional, call me a privileged white male living in a bubble, call me handsome and well dressed, but I had come to believe that there was far less hatred and fear in this country than what I saw and heard in 2014, especially related to race and gender.
I do not engage with these folks. Someone recently informed me that I am a hypocrite as this is clearly not an inclusive practice, which reminded me of the time that I was accused of discriminating against racists. While my life is chock-full of hypocrisies, I do not believe this to be one of them. Inclusion has not ever meant “anything goes.” There are certainly people that use the word that way, inclusion as representing an approach where anything goes, there are no standards, everyone gets a trophy, etc., but they are intentionally being dismissive of the idea. These are the same folks that throw a lot of “I am all for diversity, but…” phrases at you. Side note; in my experience these folks are not actually all for diversity, they just want to be disrespectful without the consequences.
Inclusion, as I use it, means the intentional including of difference in a social group or process, and not only does it not mean that we throw the standards out, it calls for a more meaningful and explicit commitment to standards. This is part of the reason why inclusion is really hard work, as most righteous things are.
So…there has to be something to be included in. There has to be a container. I try to help organizations achieve and benefit from a more inclusive organizational culture, but for anyone to be included they have to choose that container, and with an employer that means that they have to accept the standards, values and practices of the organization. There has to be a container of some kind to host a diversity of identities, experiences and perspectives, and the stronger the container, the more robust and candid the exchange can be.
There are a good many things we can discuss and debate and disagree on and I do value a mix of opinions, but if we are not able to start from a point of fundamental agreement on the idea of equality (which I understand as one of the bedrock principles of this little thing we call the U.S. of A.) we are in two fundamentally different containers.
I made a decision a long time ago to work with, encourage, and be encouraged by, the willing rather than investing my time and energy in trying to convince someone that other people are as fully human, unique and worthy as they are.
Maybe I need to revisit this decision, as this group is a bigger part of what we face than I had previously believed.
What about you?
Be good to each other.