They are who we thought they were

I once heard Maya Angelou say, "When people tell you who they are you should believe them."  I'm not sure if she is the originator of the expression, but I will credit her for it anyway.  She was, of course, referring to our tendency to want to give people the benefit of the doubt.  How many times have you heard someone excuse unacceptable behavior chalking it up to a bad day, stress, or an Irish temper?  I used to work in a call center, and we had a manager that was Straight Outa Old School. He was a mean-spirited bully who managed through fear and intimidation.  His reign of terror lasted much longer than it should, because with each episode we would shake our heads and say, "Well that's just Tom being Tom."  We wanted to believe that deep down he was a really good person who was just a little "crusty."  Nothing in his behavior supported that hope, and eventually the organization realized it had to part ways with him. As he was leaving us I thought about all of the careers he had negatively impacted and the number of talented people we lost because of him.  What was behind our reluctance to see Tom for who he was?

I believe that over time, we refused to see him because we weren't sure what it said about us. Some of us liked Tom.  Some of us hung out with him on weekends.  If he was a bad guy, and we liked him, did that make us bad?  I am thinking about this particularly in light of the 2016 Presidential race.  Donald Trump's candidacy has been a display of bad temper, misogyny, racism, and the list goes on and on.  Most people felt we were being punked as bit players in some reality television show.  But something odd began to happen.  People began supporting him in huge numbers.  It seemed that Mr. Trump had found a group of people who felt they didn't have a voice in our society. "The Donald" it seemed, was able to stand up and say everything they haven't been able to since they were shoved into the politically correct closet back in the 1980's. "Finally, they opined, someone who can tell it like it is!"   I sat back as the months passed, while most people just shook their heads in denial. "How can this be happening?" "How can people be supporting this guy?"  Most of these folks believed that his campaign would be short-lived because he was so out of step with the hearts and minds of Americans.  Surely, they said, people will come to their senses. But alas, going into the Iowa caucuses Trump was still going strong. 

And here is where the truth shows up.  We want to believe that the Trumps of the world are marginal cave dwellers whose time in our society has passed.  We don't want to believe that Trump is who we really are.  But if you ask any black person whose been racially profiled, gay person who faced discrimination,or woman who had to deal with a sexist troll at work, this is who we are.  It is in fact, who we have always been.  We close our eyes to mounting evidence that institutional racism exists, and that the prison industrial system has profited off of the mass incarceration of people of color. When one of our work associates tells us he or she was racially profiled we ask them if the are sure, or if they were just being overly sensitive.  Even as we watch Donald Trump dominate the 2016 campaign cycle and discover that the Governor of Michigan knowingly poisoned a poor community in Flint Michigan for profit, we are still in denial. http://cnn.it/1SDpWNw

We want to believe that we are a country that is beyond this type of behavior.  We want to believe that we live in a free and just society.  But how many Trumps will it take for us to realize...this is who we really are?  Unless and until we admit and really deal with it, we will keep making excuses for our behavior.

Inclusion365 Tip #12
I won't make excuses for bad behavior when I see it.  I will call it what it is, and deal with it openly.

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