| It's a bit more complicated than this. I think you start hitting on the reality towards the end but get detoured by racism in the beginning. It's all about tribal identification. I don't mean tribes in the historical sense but more akin to Godin's idea of tribes. They're the people you identify with. It's pretty well established that people like people like themselves. This isn't really that crazy. It's easy to see that liking people like yourself isn't the same as hating people that are different, it does often mean you don't respond as warmly though. Names, just like race, is just one marker, as you described it, that defines what tribe we belong to. We are all in the business of quickly assessing the situation and placing people into tribes mentally, probably unconsciously, as soon as we meet them and we will adjust our perception as we learn more about them, of course. The point of these rambling paragraphs is that I don't think this is the same as racism, though it certainly can become racism when taken to the extreme. A good example is our friend groups. If we like a certain music, a certain type of game (DnD) then you're likely to end up in a friend group with a very similar set of interests. This gets expanded to the work place in an interesting way. Lots of hip trendy employers say things like, "We wanted to build a company we loved coming to everyday". Well, in order to love being at the office every day you're going to have to like the people. Does this mean they have to be perfect matches for someone you'd place in your friend group, in your tribe? No. But it does mean they're going to have to match on some of those markers. Companies talk about "cultural fit" when hiring, hell it's on the front page here pretty regularly. In my estimation this isn't that far from not hiring people based on race. Instead we're not hiring based on some other set of markers other than race. What we're really talking about is cultural-ism where we discriminate based on particular subcultures, and markers for those subcultures. I won't argue fairness or anything like that but I do think it's important to explore the ideas that we discriminate against people regularly and only ascribe malice when it's down for racial reasons. (Not that it should matter but I'm black and I run a team of about 16 people (all white) doing sales/product management/project management/ software development in the South) |