Author:
It's been days and days. So now it seems like as good a time as any to drop more free association text. Sorry if I sound confused and uncoordinated. I guess it's the times we find ourselves in as much as anything else.
I've been thinking about the words we use and how the words we use direct the way we think about things. It's unfortunate that some of the words we use are offensive to some that might read them. I want to be clear with my language. I don't want to confuse people. I want my words to convey meaning as clearly as I can make them do it. Using words that that people find offensive might get in the way of communicating clearly. So I'll try. I;ll try to avoid using words that I know can be taken offensively unless it is intentional. So there.
When I got my first job at one of those big telephone companies in the 1980s I had a chance to go through a training lead by Jane Elliot. I don't know if you know who Jane Elliot is. She is a teacher who did an experiment with her students on racism. In her class she picked out all the blue eyed kids as the ones to discriminate against. In a mater of a few hours the full dynamics of racism and prejudice were created in her class. If you are as old as me you might have seen a segment on the 60 minutes show about this. Anyway she was asked to do this exercise as a training for a bunch of software engineers at this big phone company where I worked back in the 1980's. My eyes are kind of grey. I was divided into the blue eye group. It was a bit of a surprise to see people who I worked with in the brown eye group accept their role. They quickly accepted that blue eye people were not as smart as brown eye people. They could not appreciate the nice things that brown eye people could appreciate. Blue eye people were good for some things but not for the important things like leadership and work that required creativity. Blue eye people were only good for the basic work. The repetitive work that brown eye people found boring.
On and on like that for most of the day. At the end of the day Jane let us all know that it was just an exercise. We then had a debriefing session. Being a young "white" guy at the time I began to learn something of what discrimination means. I began to learn a little about what privileged is. but then when I was growing up I was in a home where we marched for civil rights. I went to "integrated" schools. I thought I understood. As I get older I start to see that systemic racism, the systemic bias and discrimination at work. Maybe for the first time I've seen the soft discrimination that others have had to live with. I'm older. So it's nothing like living your whole life with people assuming you are a step or two behind. Still, maybe, I'm starting to see a little bit of it.
We don't treat family that way. We don't treat our neighbors that way. We don't treat the members of our club that way. We need to stop blaming people for being victims of our bigotry. We need to let everyone be members of our club.
