Still Impressionable
What experiences in your career have awakened you to beliefs you didn't know you had, and/or made you change your mind about any of them?
For me, it took providing disability case management (DCM) services to injured workers to find out how elitist I was as a result of my upbringing. Although my parents overtly taught me not to automatically judge people on the basis of things such as race, gender or nationality, they themselves subscribed to various "-isms", mostly related to social class. Consciously, I rejected their pronouncements of "unworthy-ness" of people I liked or found interesting. But I didn't realize how much of their snobbery I'd absorbed until I started practicing in the work. Comp. System, where most of my clients have been "working class". As my caseload came to be comprised mostly of immigrants from Latin America who speak little, if any, English, the perspective I'd grown up with was challenged even more.
As a DCM, I've met wonderful people who worked at terrible jobs. A significant responsibility for me as a DCM is to do onsite job analyses; so I have had the privilege of seeing a lot of what goes on "behind-the-scenes" in both production and service industries. It's really fascinating, and I learned that many of the so-called "unskilled" or "low-skilled" jobs require skills I myself lack: tolerance for repetition and for lack of autonomy being two big ones.
As my clients let me into their lives and tell me about themselves, I wonder even more how my father - who, as an immigrant himself, had scary and degrading experiences - could still have held such contempt for people just doing their best to make an honest living. I was appalled to find out how much of his snobbery I'd absorbed in spite of myself. In the middle of listening to a client's fascinating narrative, I'd catch myself thinking "snobby" things about the choices my client made, or the perspective s/he seemed to have of the situations. I'd have to mentally shake myself to "clear the debris" from the questions I wanted to ask to keep the conversation open. I don't have to do it as much anymore, but I'm not resting on my laurels: I know someone will come along who will trigger old ways of thinking, so I have to stay alert.
Thank you, Katherine Collmer, for your blog post that was the inspiration for this one.