Interesting thoughts on prejudice

[stormkeeper_lovedoris]

I was reading an article in an HR magazine about racial prejudice in the workplace. I found these two paragraphs really interesting:

Too many of us want to be able to look down on others because someone else is looking down on us,” says Linda Gravett, Ph.D., SPHR, senior partner of Gravett and Associates, a consulting firm in Cincinnati. “There may be a flaw in our society that drives people to treat others badly because they're getting beat up themselves.”

Bill Shackelford, president of IEC Enterprises Inc. a diversity-related service company in Decatur, Ga., agrees that this may partly explain why bias exists. “We have so little understanding of what constitutes self worth that we try to find it by comparing ourselves to others so we can say ‘I’m better than him.’ ”

Comments

[carynsilver.livejournal.com]

Interesting...

[nytshd3.livejournal.com]

i can see this.... it makes sense to me, tho i'm sure a lot of it is totally subconscious

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

You know, one of the things that made it resonate with me was thinking back to that Dan Savage book. He wrote something like he didn't notice if, in Idaho (or wherever they were on the road trip) people were judging him because he was too busy judging *them* - for their body size. A classic case of someone in an 'out' group feeling like he needed to look down on others in a different 'out' group.

[razycrandomgirl.livejournal.com]

Like the crabs in the barrel