Do I Discriminate??

11/12/2009

Today, I had a good day: lecture, lab, field trip for my civil engineering class, and then I went to a leadership workshop after that. Or what I thought was a leadership workshop...it turned out mainly to be one of those long personality tests, where you answer a bunch of questions and it tells you your personality at the end.

I was slightly annoyed by this, but the free Jimmy John's sandwiches and chips calmed me down =). After taking the test, my test assigned me my personality: a Specialist, with a placed importance on friendship standards and competence. All of the descriptors of Specialist were accurate..basically, the test completely nailed my personality from 28 questions. After assigning me this personality, I had to scratch out areas on a page, and it would give me my traits. I eagerly (well, as eagerly as one could be for a test like this) scratched out my box, and it contained one word: "Discriminating".

My mind did a backflip. I was like "WTF" and proceeded to scratch out the boxes around it, which had nothing but praise ("observing, convincing, confident" etc etc). I was sorta stumped...and slightly peeved that the test had managed to guess this aspect of my personality. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it, but I feel like I do discriminate subconsciously. I always try and block out all discriminatory material from any of my interactions with other people (and probably succeed at it), but the point remains...I still feel it.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I've been around many others who have broken out of stereotypes, but I feel intolerance towards people who fall into the stereotypes of their gender or race. Asians always talking in incomprehensible languages, engineering girls gossiping about who got drunk or who got horny or who got felt up last night (i might have a blog post about this later), to name a few. I don't know if I am justified in feeling this way or not, nor how much I am able to change the way I feel, but I certainly feel extremely fake when I interact with these people. I can act accepting and all that, but down inside I still have those stereotypes, and the negative connotations they bring.

Even though I can recognize that it's wrong and that I shouldn't feel that way, I still do, and I can't control that. I think this raises an important issue: could liberals, in our ever-expanding efforts to make society more open for minority groups, be making society a more repressive place, forcing people to carry on "fake" interactions with each other? For conservatives who are against abortion or gay marriage, it seems like it's no longer a issue of WILL they come around, but rather COULD they. Of course, the current society is by no means a non-repressive society, but it seems that those who were repressed or non-repressed would have their roles switched around if liberals get their way.

But I think one thing still remains clear: that of acceptance. I understand that my views are flawed, and I consciously work to mitigate that in my interactions with the people I would discriminate against. Now if only conservatives can be more accepting of pro-choice or gay people, regardless of how they actually feel, the world would seem that much more accepting and welcoming.

-FCDH