Check this out: I was venting at a friend about how things have been with me lately, and how I've been feeling, and it turned into a conversation on how caste systems affect society, and what happens when you combine money. We came to the following conclusions.
Whether or not Americans want to believe it, this country runs on a combination of caste system and money. Here's how it works: In a work environment, you have the workers, bottom management, middle management upper management, etc. They all work on different pay scales. In a lot of cases the people in the higher rungs may think lesser of those in the lower rungs. All of this is subjective and can make or break a company, especially if it is small. Lets say you work for a company that is small, however the environment is toxic. You have a lot of bullying, passive aggressiveness and other foolishness between the workers, and on occasion the boss would dive right in and play the game as well. The boss refuses to fully train the workers for fear of one of them taking their job. The boss is arrogant and intentionally evasive when the workers ask questions on how to do their job. Lets say eventually, the boss moves to a different department, and a new boss is hired. This new boss is amazing! The boss works to establish a relationship with their workers that requires respect of all parties, and trains their crew to the point where they govern themselves while the boss is away. Now, no one is shorthanded because everybody knows how to do each other's job. This means that workers can schedule vacations without worrying about their job because someone else knows how to do it just as well. Pretty soon, the crew is happy, and will share the wealth. Word gets out that the new boss is awesome, and that boss is elected to spread their knowledge. Soon enough everybody on that level gets to work in their departments with a great boss.
However, this doesn't spread as far and wide as it could because there are still some people who adhere to the old way of doing things through intimidation, and resorting to underhanded attempts to create an establishment of a status that can't be attained by the people on the lower rungs of the ladder. These people feel they will lose their honor if they appear to like what the great bosses on the lower rungs are doing, so they adhere to the old way of doing things, and they do it willfully in order to keep their status because they are scared they will lose it in some way, shape or form.
Lets say someone from one of the higher rungs of the ladder decides to break from the norm and tries to follow the method of the boss with the good reputation. As a result, they get shunned from their original pack, meaning they may lose their status (or will be denied their raise) once word gets out. They will be considered an outcast, a pariah of sorts and no one would want to have anything to do with them because they dared to consider doing something the person on the lower rung of the ladder was doing and that it implied that such a person may have had the capability of being smart enough to have a good idea in the first place. Now all of a sudden anytime they deal with people from the pack, it will come with a cost because the pack has to defend their status to not appear weak. Now in order for the pack to appear strong, the person who was kicked out will have to give a lot more to the members of their previous pack in order to be given a shred of tolerance in the first place. In fact, they would probably be lucky if they even got that. The members of the pack will not have to work nearly as hard to receive acceptance with each other. It becomes an unspoken code.
Lets take a look at what happens when you throw money and America's caste system into the equation:
Lets say you have a person walk into a brand new market that appeared in their neighborhood. Lets say the shopkeeper and their family's ethnicity doesn't match the ethnicity of the customer. The customer looks around in the shop to find what they are looking for. The shopkeeper and their family are watching the customer's actions very intensely. There are no prices on the items. The customer asks how much a particular item is. The shopkeeper gives a price. That price is higher than the customer is used to paying for such item. The customer looks for another item, and asks the shopkeeper for the price. Again, the price is higher than usual. The shopkeeper doesn't know that the customer had done some homework before they attempted to make their purchase, and that particular shop happened to be the only shop that had the particular item at the moment. The customer leaves the store empty handed.
This situation matches the same situation I described with a corporate environment. There had to be some sort of caste system in place for them to decide to make their prices subjective. The shopkeeper's pack (people on the same corporate rung of the ladder) had decided which people get what price. Since the patron's ethnicity didn't match that of the shopkeeper, they were charged the higher price. I used this as an example because the same thing happened to me. I went to a computer store to find a CPU that had been slightly outdated. I wasn't looking to upgrade my computer, so I was hoping to settle for the outdated CPU at the moment.The location didn't have prices on their stuff, so the wife of the owner called her husband. They didn't know that I knew their language, so when she spoke to him, she looked up at me and said "Black" in her language. The price of the CPU was $30.00 MORE than was mentioned on Amazon.com, which was the cheapest site I could find. The other stores in the location said they could special order it for much cheaper than that, and were giving me the same quote that Amazon.com gave me. I decided I didn't need the CPU, and I was able to fix my computer without a new one.
I learned that if a person defines what does and what does not gain credit in a society, then they can change said society. In the corporate instance, the same tactics used to establish hierarchy were abolished, and a new society was born. This can be done with the shopkeeper situation as well. In the shopkeeper situation, everybody felt like they couldn't afford to change it, just like the other people in the corporate environment. They pushed against it so they can keep their status and so called honor. It seems that the boss who spread the knowledge was the one who felt they could afford to do so. As a result, the boss has a happy crew of people who want to come to work. The people who were so busy trying to maintain the status quo were the ones who were so busy trying to keep things the way they were. If everybody in each situation felt they could afford to drop the perceived status, they wouldn't need to keep score of what they feel that needs to be done to maintain their honor.
It was that moment where I found out this thinking may be the formula that could have the potential to solve racism.
No comments:
Post a Comment