Today, I'd like to talk about cultural conditioning, particularly mine. A few weeks ago I really did some self-evaluation of my passing judgement on others. It was triggered by such a trivial thing, I was in Australia at McDonalds with my husband. We were sitting outside enjoying our frozen Cokes and a nice humid breeze. We were getting ready to leave when a young man asked if he could clear anything away from us, I looked up and found myself looking at a young man who looked very much like my husband (white, clean cut and very kind.) Then I directed my attention to the inside of the restaurant and there was a pretty blonde girl changing the garbage bags. I felt sad, really sad, as in talking-my-husbands-ear-off-wanting-to-cry-for-them sad. After a few minutes of me being oversensitive, he and I came to the conclusion that I have become SO conditioned to seeing immigrants working these entry-level grunt-work jobs, that I no longer feel sorry for them. That being said, I feel bad because I understand how hard they work for such little pay, yet I always turn around and think "Hey, at least they have a job?" Seeing these individuals working not only made me realize how much I turn a blind eye to people here at home but also, how easily that could be me in that situation.
I have taken some time to read through my previous posts. Throughout every post there is a common theme that I seem to preach: through media engagement or disengagement we are reinforcing our own ideas or our own ethnocentrism. We have a great access to information and new ideas, however, our automatic attitudinal response is our biggest barrier. We are constantly using the media as only a mirror to compare our own culture and ideals to others, only to look but not necessarily to change.
I am now working to practice what I preach, if you look back to my post for Racism 2.0 my stance was "integration integration integration!" because inherently I didn't think that racism still existed. However, scroll up to the top paragraph of this post and you will see not only does it exist within my culture, but I am an active participant. My only hope is that I will have more opportunities to be aware of my hidden presumption. It is through truly recognizing them, not just comparing them, that I can change.
Lacey,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post and having done the same thing with my posts I know how hard it is to admit our faults. I am curious however as I wrote what I could about overcoming my bias and thinking that it wouldn't be enough, what is your plan to "practice what you preach?" Because we are set up with these pre-dispositions and even though we have caught ourselves having them we are not healed. In my post I used the first step of AA which is recognizing that you have a problem which I see you did. My second and third steps were talking myself through problems before I speak or type and then weighing out both sides but as easy as it is to say it is hard to do in everyday life. My pre-dispostion was anti-establishment and with the elections this year it is hard for me to not speak my mind. I remember my 6th grade teacher told me that if when I grew up I decided not to vote that I had no right to speak about politics with voting American's. My ego surpassed what she said and I spoke out but like she told me, I had no real authority to speak that way. Your automatic response is something that you can speak on, it is the world you live in and so it is not a once every four years problem and I am genuinely curious how you plan to stop yourself daily until your habit it reversed or nullified? Thank you again for your post.
Lacey,
ReplyDeleteThis was such a great post! I have to admit, I did not even realize that I do that same exact thing until I read your post. We completely overlook minorities or simply those that look different from us and yet when someone who is similar to us is in a sort of unfortunate circumstance, we all of a sudden notice and react. I see myself doing it with age discrimination. When I see a bunch of young high school/college kids working at the same job (ie Target, Jimmy Johns..) and then a middle aged man or woman also working there, I think "that's so depressing! I wonder why they have to work here? Are they supporting a family, are they single?" All of these questions and thoughts I shouldn't even have in the first place! You are not alone in doing this so don't be hard on yourself. I think it's easy for us in the moment to be ashamed of ourselves for how we passed judgement on someone yet as Daxton mentioned, we hardly ever really change. We "punish" ourselves for a while then forget. Not that I'm saying that's your case at all, just that it's really hard to turn off these automatic responses. I think the best thing to do is realize they are there and when the situation arrives, try to stop the judgement and think of a different conclusion. For example, when I think negatively on the woman shopping with filthy and un-manageable kids and find myself mentally glaring at her, I try to stop and think, "maybe she has been sick all week and her kids haven't gotten any sleep either.." "maybe their washer broke and they don't have the money to fix it right away and they have literally run out of clean clothes." "maybe her husband is in the hospital and she can barely function emotionally right now let alone make sure her kids look and act perfect." When I think of these alternate circumstances, it makes me feel compassion towards others. Now do I accomplish this every time? Definitely not! It is hard! All we can do is try again every single time, every single day. I hope we can both work harder to overcome our automatic responses and judgements, thanks for a great post!