MAFS Season 16: Nashville Discussion Threads

When I worked at DuPont years ago we had diversity groups the managers were invited to attend. As a white woman I thought it might be helpful. I spent several years studying my own bias. I didn’t even realize I had bias. If you grew up like I did in the 1960’s in America you have bias, no matter what color or gender you are. It comes from the messages you received as a child and how they got embedded in there. In these groups you were encouraged to think back to the early messages you had about race or about gender. I remember as a child looking through my mother’s high school yearbook where there were pictures of “white” and “colored” water fountains. When I asked my mother why it was that way she said “that’s just the way things were” which was a pointless answer and failed to satisfy my curiosity. So I thought to myself “these colored people must be dirty…that’s why they couldn’t drink from the white fountains.” So from that point on I had the ungodly belief that black people were dirty. Once I uncovered this yuk inside of myself, I set about to bring it to the surface and deal with it so I could lead a normal life around people who didn’t look like me. That’s what I mean about doing the work. If one desires to live free around others there is work to be done on the inside of themselves.