Circling the issue of diversity

When people meet my friend Dan, they often turn away from him, act like they’re suddenly busy with lint in their pockets…anything to avoid looking at him or shaking hands with him.

Why this almost universal response?

It’s simply because Dan has quadriplegia. Many people are fearful that they’ll do something wrong when they meet him—they fear they won’t know how to shake hands with him or how to talk to him—should they remain standing, should they kneel beside his chair, should they offer to help him? So rather than deal with their own anxiety about the situation, it’s just easier for them to move away.

Rather than navigate the treacherous waters of difference, unable to determine the correct terminology for individuals or groups of people (since the rules seem to change constantly), unsure of how to relate to others and engage with them, many people have simply stopped interacting with those different from themselves altogether.  Rather than engage, we avoid because when divergent views or different kinds of people meet, we often feel fearful, awkward, and anxious. To avoid putting ourselves there, we increasingly avoid encounters with difference altogether. We put ourselves in gated communities, both literally and figuratively.

Rather than err and describe an African-American person as black when they prefer another term, we engineer ourselves out of situations where we’d need to make that decision. Rather than risk offending a person who is Muslim by raising the question of their religious beliefs and dress, we avoid them. Rather than be rebuked for mentioning someone’s race—even though studies show that skin color is the first thing we notice when meeting someone—we pretend we don’t notice the difference.

The result? More division, misunderstanding, distrust.

We avoid difference to sanitize what is messy and to make ourselves feel more comfortable. But life is messy. And learning comes from discomfort. As Madame Curie has said, “dissymmetry causes phenomenon.” Without the dissymmetry, there isn’t movement, innovation, change, learning.

Perhaps we have difficulty acknowledging and walking toward difference because we have confused recognizing difference with making a judgment. One of the first employees I supervised was an African-American woman named Annette. Once she overheard me describing to a Board member who had never met her how he could recognize her in a meeting they were both attending later in the week, a meeting at which Annette would be the only African-American participant. Bemused, she listened to me use every other possible descriptor: “Annette? Well, she’ll be the well-dressed young woman with dark hair who is 5-feet, 6 inches tall. I’ll ask her to wear her name tag.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier,” she said afterwards, “to tell him I’ll be the only African-American there?” Why did I hesitate? I didn’t want to define her by her skin color, I wasn’t sure if she preferred to be described as African-American or black, and I had confused discussing difference with making a judgment.

We learn from a young age not to acknowledge difference. When my older daughter was quite young, she saw a man in a wheelchair at the grocery store one day. “Mama!” she shouted, “that man has no legs!” My immediate reaction? “Shhhhh!” I whispered. “It’s not polite to point.”

It wasn’t new information to the man in the wheelchair that he had no legs, anymore than it is news to my African-American friends that their skin is darker than mine. By minimizing the difference and walking away from it, we lose the ability to talk about it, to acknowledge the often unconscious judgments that lie behind that discomfort, and to learn from and make the difference usable in some way.

Gordon Allport, author of The Nature of Prejudice, built a model from his research at Harvard called "The Stages of Prejudice." Acts we know as wrong are included, such as discrimination and violence, but the first stage of prejudice might surprise you: avoidance.

Many people talk about wanting a “colorblind” society in which we don’t notice difference, but to ignore our differences by avoiding them is to render all of our lives, identities, contributions, and backgrounds trivial. We must learn how to talk about our differences, not around them. We must move from avoidance to engagement, from fear to creativity, from the vicious circle to the virtuous circle.

--Patti Digh

Comments

[Steve Sherlock]

I don't know how I missed finding this part of your writing Patti. I guess I never spent much time exploring your other links. These circles are definitely inspirational and re-uable, thanks!

[Peggy Pusch]

This article with the vicious and virtual circles, is a great short article on the topic of encountering difference and avoidance. The models (we know where they started :-)) are really nice.