article taken from linkedin
Politically Incorrect?
We took our youngest to Fort Collins to watch his brother play in the state marching band finals last Saturday. (They took third in the state: go Fairview Marching Knights!) It was a glorious fall day. On the way home we stopped for Mexican food and I said to my eleven-year-old, "They call this Indian summer."
No sooner had we arrived home than my daughter, twenty years old and a junior in college, texted me. "Story idea for you: Indian summer," said her text. "Evidently not PC."
I jumped on Google to do some research. I found a lot of questions: "Is 'Indian summer' an offensive term?" but no clear answers.
If "Indian summer" falls under the Political Correctness sword, I thought, it won't be long before Polish sausage, Chinese checkers and Russian roulette follow. And what about Greek yogurt? These would be very sad developments.
People are surprised when they learn that I'm an avid non-fan of the Political Correctness craze. "You're so pro-people," they say, "I figured you'd be all over that stuff." That's the problem with the buckets and categories we love to lump people, words and ideas into. They never capture the story.
I am horrified as an American to contemplate, much less tell my children about, the abysmal treatment of minorities in our country's history, from the native Americans the European settlers displaced and slaughtered to the national shame of legal slavery on American soil.
I'm saddened and disgusted by the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and by the awful way other minority groups are treated in the US even today.
Banning words and ideas is not the way to right those old wrongs. Shaming people is the worst way to teach anything, and beyond that, updating a lexicon by force is not the path to enlightenment.
When we teach diversity workshops, we ask participants to send us questions they'd like answered in advance, so they don't have to ask them aloud in class. Their fear of saying or doing the wrong things is threaded through their questions. "What exactly constitutes sexual harassment?" men want to know. "I'm afraid to give a woman a compliment, in case I'm hauled into HR." Every time I hear that sentiment, I'm reminded that making people afraid to talk to one another is not the way to build community.
We should be digging into and dissecting human situations all the time, not telling people what horrible fate will befall them if they step across the invisible fault line we've never bothered to point out.
We need more conversation about race, gender and ethnicity at work, not less! We need more trust and less fear around these sticky human topics. Chastising people for choosing the wrong phrase or using an expression like Indian summer in the absence of any malice is the world's worst way to build bridges.
On Tuesday we got a call from an HR leader at a Human Workplace company who'd had a scrape with the Indian summer issue herself. Someone in one of the plants she looks after had sent out a memo that used the phrase "Indian summer" in the same manner I explained the concept to my son. Someone else had objected.
"The employee told me that she doesn't have Native American ancestry herself but that she was offended that we would use the term in a company newsletter," the HR chief explained. We put out the question to our panel of Human Workplace correspondents, none of whom had heard an objection to the term 'Indian summer' before.
"It doesn't surprise me that 'Indian summer' would go under the chopping block,' wrote one panelist. "Which term will be next?"
Here's what's next, evidently: a campaign that seeks to end the wearing of culturally-themed Halloween costumes, following the logic that reducing a national culture to a costume is demeaning. I wrote this article when the issue hit my radar screen, and this year I'm even more dismayed by the misguided and very un-human effort to get people to stop dressing up like Pocahontas and Madame Butterfly on Halloween or, I'm presuming, any other day of the year.
If it's de facto offensive to dress up as Pocahontas, is it likewise politically incorrect to spend a weekend in Santa Fe and while there, grab some Southwestern boots and a broomstick skirt? What about the custom of wearing something green on St. Patrick's day? Is that a cultural slur against the Irish?
If Irish-Americans decided to freak out because a sacred day borrowed from their heroic past (which is a Culture, not a Drunken Holiday) had been reduced to an excuse to wear green and get hammered, whole industries would implode.
In my long experience teaching people about diversity and inclusion, wagging a finger in their faces and telling them what NOT to do is the worst possible way to build understanding.
Tolerance grows when there are no bad guys or good guys in the mix, just ordinary people muddling through unfamiliar territory together and feeling comfortable asking "What's your take?" of one another.
Campaigns like "Culture, not a Costume" shame and castigate people for their transgressions instead of opening a dialog about our vast common ground as humans and expanding on it to build awareness and, over time, community.
If my daughter were seven instead of twenty, I'd love to buy her a Pocahontas costume and explain the history of Native Americans in the process. Should I be forbidden to buy the outfit? and if I am, how does that help my Native American brothers and sisters?
We know that shoving rules in people's faces never raises their consciousness. It does just the opposite. People given rules to follow begrudgingly oblige, learning nothing in the process. We get the phone calls every day.
"My Marketing Manager used an ice-breaker in our management retreat that caused mayhem," says a distressed HR VP. "What was the ice-breaker?" we asked. "Horoscopes," said the HR leader. "She had mini-horoscopes created for each of our leaders, a cute idea except that she read the horoscopes aloud in the meeting and included each executive's birth year. No one was pleased. Two VPs got up and walked out."
That Marketing manager surely knew the published rules in her company. Unfortunately no one had written up the rule "Don't mention your colleagues' ages or birth years," no doubt assuming that it went without saying. As a society we teach people at work to see tiny patches of tree bark when we should be teaching them to navigate the forest. Cultural awareness is forest-learning, not tree-bark, rule-based stuff. Banning words and costumes won't raise awareness, but it's guaranteed to arouse resentment. Will that resentment help build tolerance and community, or hinder it?
Find your employee handbook's Diversity Statement, which is likely to read like this: "At Acme Explosives, we are committed to diversity. Absolutely no discrimination of any kind will be tolerated and any discriminatory actions will get your ass fired in a New York minute."
We know better than to expect open communication, the kind that would build trust and minimize problems, in an environment whose standards are framed that way: Screw Up and You're Toast.
We could educate people about culture and acceptance instead of telling them which words we don't want to hear and which costumes we won't allow them to wear on Halloween, but that wouldn't give us the cozy holier-than-thou feeling we get when we stand in judgment on people who are less Politically Aware than we are. That's not a solution. It's just more Godzilla machinery, lefty-flavored but no less insidious and damaging than the rest of the strictures that keep us from bringing ourselves to work all the way.
Halloween, like any holiday, is special because we're lifted out of the humdrum everyday. The costumes we wear are part of the ritual and the theatre of this day. This is what culture is - the experience of sharing the everyday routines and the punctuating holidays and festivals that break the rhythm and lift us into the realm of myth. That's why people dress up as geishas and Native American warriors on Halloween.
Culture is what makes us human, and any effort to teach understanding must begin from the place "None of us is right or wrong on this topic, and every word and any action must be viewed in context."
We're all trying to get through the day, no little feat in these challenging times. Can we put aside the wagging finger and the "Don't you dare" memes and encourage more meaty conversation about sticky human topics like race, gender and national origin, remembering that unless the energy is positive and accepting of all who join the conversation, no progress is possible? I think we are capable of that. Political Correctness is no doubt well-intended, but it's not a human solution. Company policy and Don't You Dare campaigns are not the answer, but honest, open and non-judgmental conversation most surely is.
Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131031064119-52594-politically-incorrect
