I know two individuals at a well-known business school that are gossips. I don’t know whether being judgmental is a requisite trait of a gossip but they also happen to be judgmental individuals. One day they were badmouthing a girl who was not part of their social circle. Whatever their criteria for being “cool” this girl obviously did not meet them. As result, everything she did and said was met with disparaging thoughts and remarks. On this particular day they were discussing the discovery of a “tramp stamp” tattoo on the girl (in case you are not aware, as I was not, a tramp stamp tattoo is usually a “tribal mark” and it is positioned on the lower back, right above the waistline. Also, the tramp stamp is supposed to be a sign of sexual promiscuity). The two individuals found the tramp stamp comical because as they put it, the girl “just doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would have a tramp stamp.”
I thought this episode was interesting for two reasons: For one, although these two gossips are relatively young and the content of their discussion commensurately “youthful”, this kind of gossiping and accompanying judgments are prevalent in offices of professional employment throughout the U.S. The second reason this was interesting was that it gave me the perfect way to present a perspective I have on diversity.
To begin, all the players in the “tramp stamp” story above are of the same race and one of the gossips is of the same gender as the “gossip-ee(?)” Yet she was different enough based on her perceived level of “cool,” that instead of accepting her difference, they reacted with scorn towards anything that she did or said that did not match their perception of her.
Indulge me in a quick anthropological diversion before I continue…: The propensity to be judgmental is very human. After all, our past experiences are all we have to assist us in making decisions. Having sometimes life or death decisions to make, we resort to categorizing people and things and we develop expectations of the people and things based on these past experiences so that we can make quick decision. The problem is that we don’t realize we are doing it.
In our Leadership Organization (L-O) class at Darden, we learned about being “in the box.” We understand the concept of the box when it’s obvious but we don’t recognize how easily and unconsciously we can fall into that box. We have gotten to a point where the categorizations we make are so widespread and accepted that we can’t imagine that we may be operating from within the box.
Take Susan Boyle for example. Had Susan not blown us away with her singing we would ALL have continued – without as much as a second thought – believing that a chubby woman in her late 40s had no business in a singing talent show. In fact, I submit that if her performance was merely acceptable, we would still have gone away thinking that Susan overstepped her boundaries. Consequently, we unconsciously raise the bar of acceptability for those whom we’ve decided are acting out of their character. Thus the girl with the tramp stamp having a difficult time doing anything “cool.”
Now to tie this to diversity as we usually think about it in the U.S. Many of us profess to be race blind or color blind and I believe that most of us truly desire to be so. The problem arises when our unconscious judgments about other groups affect how we behave towards them. And I’m not talking about judgments as obvious as believing that Indians should be good in math or that African-Americans are not articulate. I’m talking about what happens when you think the Indian guy shaking his head while talking is a geek or when you call the Black guy “Pooty Gee” because you think he’s lame for bragging about his financial well-being and his sexual conquests. In those cases, even if the person who is making judgments knows in his heart that he doesn’t intend to be racist, if the behavior that is the source of the judgment IS, or is PERCEIVED to be inseparable from one’s culture and/or race, the issue is racial one. Both parties to those interactions need to be careful not to judge.
For those of us who are likely to find ourselves the subject of an unfair judgment, it is of the utmost importance to draw a distinction between a situation with a racist person and a situation with racial undertones. The result may be the same if the person judging behaves in a way that tends to alienate an entire group of people; however, we should be loath to call someone a racist without overwhelming corroborative evidence and/or testimony from others. Accusing someone of racism can backfire and further alienate the accuser from other people in the organization. The accusation can also cause great damage to the alleged perpetrator if he or she has been wrongfully accused. More to the point of this article though, just because the person judging you is of a different race than you doesn’t mean that he doesn’t just think you’re lame.
So to the judgmental person – Judge not. Recognize… accept… no, appreciate the complexity of the diversity of the human individual. That may sound L-O sappy but that difference in perspective will truly make you a better person. Besides, considering the fact that we are now living in a revenge-of-the-nerds era in which being a geek is actually a cool thing, I’m sure many former associates now wish they had Mark Zukerberg’s social network.
Lastly, if you are the person who may suspect that you are being judged in a negative way, my opinion is that the most effective way to disabuse someone of his misconception is to do what Susan Boyle did – succeed where the person imagined you’d fail. Succeeding may be a tall task if the person who is wrongly judging you has power to affect your fate; however, in most cases, whether someone dislikes you based on the values he assigns to your age, your experience, your position in life, your profession, your race, or your level of cool, performing well is the best way to shut him up.
Mack Audena ’12
