Listen for the full hour

I attended a diversity training the other day. For those of you who exist outside of corporate America, this would be a training in which one is taught how to recognize, consider, and be respectful of diversity in the workplace. It was well done. Of course I went in with few expectations, so I wasn't going to be hard to please, but the day was well used afterall. I think my favorite statement came when a fellow attendee was suggesting that she didn't appreciate a fictional character we were using in an exercise because this person had chosen to home school their children due to the immoral and amoral environment they perceived in the public school system. A fellow class member proceeded to say "We must be as tolerant of the intolerant as we are of any other person." The look on the woman's face was one of pure revelation. It was as if she had never considered the idea that a white, conservative, evangelical Christian is just as "diverse" as anyone else, and worthy of the same level of inclusion and respect as would be offered to a minority, for instance. It was quite a remarkable event.



But, probably one of the more interesting tidbits I picked up was with regard to first impressions. Apparently there are studies showing that first impressions are unavoidable. That is, humans register first impressions quite naturally. However, after a first impression, a person will then spend a massively disproportionate amount of time attempting to confirm the first impression. For instance, in a one hour interview, the interviewer will commonly have a first impression in five minutes, and will spend the next fifty-five minutes attempting to prove the first impression correct. Naturally the application for the lesson was to be aware of first impressions, and not to allow them undue influence on one's decision making processes.



As soon as I heard this though, I realized how many people I've known (myself included) who apply roughly this same process to a whole array of important decisions in their life. Allow me to offer a story. Growing up in central Idaho, and even later attending high school in western Washington, I didn't have much of an opportunity to hang out with African Americans. (My black friend would later tell me to call him "black". He would say, 'I don't want to go to Africa. I've seen pictures. It looks pretty, but it's got a lot of diseases.') So, when I got to college in Texas and started spending time with a young man from Houston who happened to be black, I realized the very small amount of time I'd given to my concept of racism in America was grossly underfunded. In my lifetime I'd allotted what amounted to five minutes in an hour deciding racism no longer existed, and then spent the remaining years ignoring or discounting any information which would offer an alternate theory. Not even the L.A. riots could change my mind (though to give myself a little leeway, I was a pre-teen at the time). That's why I was simply shocked when one day my friend kept insisting racism was as active as ever, especially in the culture in which he'd been raised. I could not believe it. Surely it was extremly isolated, like maybe to the banjo country of Mississippi, I suggested. No, he told me. It's everywhere. I still couldn't believe it. Then he said, "You're from the Northwest...like a Utopia. It's not like that everywhere." The Northwest isn't a Utopia, but I most certainly had not been forced to deal with racism in my upbringing. My parents had taught me that a person's skin color was just that, I hadn't at any point in my childhood been forced to acknowledge that not everyone felt that way, and I had gone on my merry way. It wasn't until someone who knew otherwise challenged my viewpoint that I corrected my understanding, and then only after that person forcefully ripped away the filter I had so permanentally and expertly installed on my consciousness.



As I think about this I wonder how many of us have done the same, but perhaps in the area of parenting, marriage, spirituality, politics, or maybe even our own past. Out of a lack of understaning, and an unwillingness to re-evaluate our current level of awareness, we leave ourselves incomplete. I know I for one will certainly be making every effort to spend the full hour listening and asking questions before I come to any more conclusions.