On a typical weekend evening, we jut out to one of our favorite Italian restaurants. It’s a contemporary Italian restaurant, so it doesn’t necessarily have classics like you might expect, such as lasagna. However, they have exceptional cocktails and reimagined dishes in wonderful ways. Oh, and the staff is great, we know many of them by name.
As we walk through the door, the young hostess greets us. She asks us the typical questions (Reservations? How many?) and proceeds to walk us to our table, carrying a couple of menus. We settle on our seats. Finally, as the hostess walks away, I note to myself that she wears a sternum nose piercing and wondered if that was appropriate for the hostess.
If you’re unfamiliar, a sternum nose piercing goes between both nostrils. The quickest way to give you a visual is that this is the typical piercing that you’d see in a cartoon bull. Is this, okay?
My own sense of style
I navigated high school as a geek; I bore no shame for my interest in mathematics or computers. For better or worse, it also typecasted me, though this happens to everyone. That said, I was more than the stereotype; I aspired to be different.
For men, which ear (right or left) also indicated whether you’re heterosexual. As a young man in college, I floated the idea that I’d get an ear piercing to my mother. Her literal response was, “I don’t want to see you with an earring.” Months after I started college, I drove by the mall in North Miami Beach and got my ear pierced.
Upon returning home that weekend, I put a bandage on my ear. Once my mom noticed, she asked why I bandaged my ear. While she scowled at me, she did not demand for me to take it off. She understood that while she had her own standards, and mine would inevitably be different.
I’d like to think that in her own way, she respected me for it.
Standards change over time
To put it in perspective, this was just an earring. I could easily take off the tiny object and put it away. I pierced my ear in the mid-1980’s and many years have passed since. The standards have changed. We’ve gone from a standard where the only body part we pierced is the ear to a wealth of other body parts in different ways.
Similarly, there are more people sporting ink. There are tattoos what can speak volumes about your person, and what is important to you. Similarly, they can be points of remembrance of those who you love. As I grew up, only sailors and bikers sported tattoos, now many people from all walks of life sport tattoos.
Finally, we see people who style and color their hair in distinctive ways. A friend, and manager of engineers, wore his hair in a mohawk. Another friend, also manager of designers, wears her hair with brightly colored streaks which do not naturally occur in nature. They’re both incredibly competent and respected. How they wore their hair didn’t matter.
Resisting new standards
In light of all that, why did I remember the hostess wearing a nose ring? Why did it tickle my sensibilities about what is ‘presentable’? We can reason that each of us will have a set changing standards to which we will easily accept. However, that also means that there are other changes which will we are likely to resist.
I work on technology; the very nature of our business is to introduce new things. The danger is resisting change merely for the principle of resisting change. Change is unsettling and unfamiliar, but it’s not, in and of itself, a bad thing. We segregated our schools by race, and abruptly we stopped. Was this a bad change?
I reflect back upon that young hostess and concluded that I was projecting my biases. I simply couldn’t reason why her nose ring was any less acceptable than a pair of earrings. If I expected people to accept me for who I was when I first pierced my ear, I needed to extend her the same courtesy.
Some standards have a cultural bias
Neighborhood watch forums needed to post a warning. A black man merely walking through your street was not, in and of itself, suspicious. Residents watch white strangers walking through their streets without incident, but a black man triggers a different response. While they didn’t necessarily think about the skin color, one pedestrian seemed more suspicious than others.
As I reflect upon the changing standards of beauty, I’m also required to ponder about which standards have been slow to change. More than once I read through articles where employers instruct young women to wear their hair in a way that is “more presentable”. When they asked to elaborate, responses included descriptions like “too ethnic.”
Similarly, did these employers actively ponder if these women looked ‘Caucasian enough’? No, I honestly believe that they followed what they believed to be ‘presentable’. However, I also believe that these employers never contemplated whether the standards for ‘presentable’ effectively meant ‘more Caucasian’.
Need we unravel all our existing standards?
I don’t believe that it’s necessary to revisit every single rule-of-thumb by which we operate immediately. First, the list is much too long to create, and it’d take considerable time to implement those changes. Second, those rules are bound to change as we discover new information and subtle nuances come to light.
However, there are ways in which we can conduct ourselves that makes us better, more empathetic people:
- Allow people to speak up and challenge policies, give them an environment where they know they’ll be heard.
- When you get such feedback, listen openly and honestly.
- Understand that you may suffer from status-quo bias. Just remember that if you never change anything, you can’t improve anything.
Perhaps the best approach is to address the changes which will be the most impactful first.
You may conclude that you don’t care to entertain these changes. You absolutely can; it is your prerogative. However, understand that the world is not stopping to accommodate your resistance, and you’ll be left behind. The path of least resistance may ultimately be to embrace the change.