A Reflection on Diversity & Equality in a Psychology Course (2021)
A Reflection on Diversity & Equality in a Psychology Course (2021)
Madeleine Gorges
When working with people different from you, should you acknowledge those differences? Should you treat everyone equally? I recently posed these questions to the students in my Organizational Behavior course.
The questions came from my personal reflections on the relationship between individual differences and striving for equality. Many years ago I read the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. It opens with an intriguing premise: “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” Anyone with an exceptional gift or ability is brought down to average by handicaps. Dancers wear bags of weights, beautiful people wear masks. A character with above average intelligence wears a radio earpiece that emits sporadic noises to keep him from “taking unfair advantage of [his] brain.” While certainly not a prophetic portrayal of the future (at least I sincerely hope not!), the story left me questioning the concept of human equality.
My students have no such qualms. Their answers to the quiz questions resounded in a beautiful chorus: Yes, acknowledge differences. And yes, treat everyone equally. Period. I felt a wave of relief and clarity as I read their responses. Several of them elaborated with themes of respect and emphasized that we are all part of the human race. One student summed up the take-home message: You don’t have to treat everyone the same, but you do have to treat them equally. The students’ responses helped me conclude that the equality is in the value of the person, not in the specifics of interactions.
For the second question on the quiz we watched this TED Talk by Stella Young about how a physical disability does not make her exceptional. She is tired of seeing motivational posters of people with disabilities that come across with the message of, “However bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.” I asked my students how Stella Young wants to be treated. The consensus was that she wants to be treated as “normal.” But one of my students phrased that in an interesting way that I believe demonstrates how careful we have to be about ingrained, implicit biases. He said, “Stella wants to be treated like a person without a disability.” I can see how the feeling behind this statement might be the same as saying she wants to be treated like a normal person, but I do not think that was the message Stella was trying to convey. She was trying to expand our definition of normal to include people with disabilities. She would like to see a world in which disabilities are part of the diverse spectrum of “normal.” In her own words: “I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.”
The final quiz question was about Mellody Hobson’s TED Talk on being color brave, not color blind. Students commented that Ms. Hobson wants a world in which people are comf