A Thousand Tiny Cuts

I'm showing my university composition students the film, CRASH, winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in 2005. The film brilliantly cuts from scene to scene with tiny scenarios depicting biases too numerous to list here. This movie is full of equal opportunity slights, slams, epithets and worse. It takes the subject of diversity and shows a thousand sides, slips, cuts and injuries until the viewer can't help but see some part of himself among the various characters.

Diversity is not dead, but alive and well and operating continuously beneath the surface of our lives. And we'd better pay heed.

A colleague of mine recently dug himself into a hole that may eventually bury one of his client relationships. He runs a small educational learning business that subcontracts training to various constituencies within corporations. One such workshop he offers is an ESL (English as a second language) speech improvement course to people who identify themselves as less than secure in command of spoken English.

He visited another class offered for a current client, and proceeded to probe the Asian members on how long they had been in this country, as if that would in any way indicate their need (or desire) for speech improvement. One of the women took him on, asking him why he needed to know such a thing. The whole room froze. His simple request for information became an intrusion into privacy as well as an insult to the Asians present, indicating that since they were not native English speakers, they must have a problem.

He knows he made a mistake, but my colleague actually set himself up for something worse: now the woman who challenged him plans to go to HR and complain. He won't lose the current contract, but he may not get another, at least not from this client.

What does this all mean, and how does this relate to Crash? Beware of assumptions about people; we make them all the time and to our peril. Crash held a mirror up to Everyman: and that's you and I. My husband is 75, not retired, an avid reader, author and wage earner.He met a local politician in a nearby park who, not knowing anything about my husband, suggested he visit the senior center down the street since they had great Bingo opportunities. My husband instantly disliked this man and in the recent election voted against him. Why? It's a thousand tiny cuts that can make or break our success or happiness. We must all be aware.