By Leonard Carr

Many tensions occur in society today as a result of the almost imperceptible abuse of power that is strongly felt, but rarely seen or acknowledged. The types of abuse to which I refer are the subtle dehumanising practices that are so common and so widespread that people are too habituated and desensitised to even notice them. Despite being seldom noticed or acknowledged, the corrosive entropic effects that these practices have on trust and the general fabric of relationships are very real.

These subtle dehumanising practices can be the reason why people in companies, happy in their roles and enjoying the work that they do, never buy-in or really become committed to or identified with their employer. These dehumanising practices can be and often are readily denied, allowing the perpetrators to continue to act with impunity. They are also denied because perpetrators do not wish to believe themselves to harbour prejudice or ill- will towards those whom they, in their conscious thought, may actually like and even respect. They indulge in these practices out of habit and because-as a result of upbringing and cultural stereotyping, they do not even realise that these attitude exist in them. 

When I pose the following question to people, they almost all give the same reply: Imagine that you lend someone $100 which they say they will return to you on Thursday. On Friday  they return with $98. What would be your reaction? The majority of people say that they would let it go without saying anything. When asked how they would feel, all say disrespected and abused. This is a useful metaphor for why people cannot confront many of the more disguised forms of dehumanising practices. That metaphorical two percent is large enough for the victim to legitimately feel robbed, disrespected and taken advantage of. The amount, however, is too small for the victim to confront the person without appearing petty or stingy. This applies more especially if it means running the risk of being accused of possessing those negative qualities on the basis of gender, culture or nationality.

Practically this level of dehumanising practice can be seen when someone greets people in a group saying a few words to each, but greeting one or a minority of targeted people in a brief and perfunctory way. Another example would be laughing the jokes of everyone in the "inner circle", no matter how inane, and not responding to those of people in the "out group" not matter how amusing. Making eye contact with their inner circle and keeping others in their peripheral vision would be another example. A person who greets a diverse group in the speaker's mother tongue, which is not the accepted business language, implicitly excludes those who do not speak or identify with that language.

Of course, when the exclusionary person needs something from someone in the marginalised group, they will speak to them as enthusiastically and "normally "as they do to the others. This has the victim and any observer wondering if they are perhaps being too sensitive or just going crazy in assuming that the perpetrator is in fact behaving in discriminatory ways. The same person may also appear to give marginalised people less glamorous or less career building tasks. They will offer more lavish praise to their "in-crowd" colleagues than to their less preferred colleagues.

Dehumanising practices appear to be about race, religion, age, ability and gender, but they are really about power. When the abuse of power is institutionalised, as it was in the case of apartheid, it is easy to see, protest, confront, resist or work around. When the espoused value of an individual, a group or organisation is to disallow any discrimination, but the embodied values of people in power betray that value, then dehumanising practices flourish in ways too subtle or disguised to confront. In organisational cultures where this phenomenon occurs, trust and a sense of belonging are eroded in members of groups who perceive themselves to be targeted in this way.

Beliefs, prejudices and attitudes that manifest in dehumanising practices are usually ingrained and taken for granted, and consequently remain opaque to the person harbouring them. The phenomenon of people taking for granted as real certain subjective values or beliefs shows most noticeably in social situations when people are literally just being themselves. For example, one might observe at the dinner table how male voices are given more authority than female voices. Men get heard more easily, and therefore need to make less effort to make their point. A man's point will be more readily agreed with than a female counterpart who may need to work quite hard to get heard or taken seriously. At the conclusion of the meal, without any discussion or negotiation having taken place, the women will probably get up and start to clear the table and the men will carry on their conversation without flinching. This same scenario can play itself out at an office social where women on the same or even senior levels to their male colleagues are expected to fulfil the stereotyped female gender role.

The next levels of dehumanising practices are less subtle but still seemingly benign and hard to confront. They are apparently benign because those engaging in such practices are able to strongly protest and deny wrong-doing when challenged, on the basis that the  accuser is being hyper-sensitive or hyper-critical. It is in the nature of the politics that gives rise to dehumanising practices that the perpetrator, not the victim, gets to adjudicate the legitimacy and extent of the hurt and offence taken.

This level of dehumanising practices can be seen in the way people change their accents when speaking to people from other cultures, shout at blind people as if they are deaf, speak their own language in front of colleagues who do not understand and roll their eyes and act as if they are speaking to an intellectually impaired person if they have to repeat an instruction. The truth of the matter is that such behaviour would be no less dehumanising, and possibly even more so, if the affected persons were intellectually impaired.

People who engage in this type of dehumanising behaviour so take their assumptions for granted, including the belief in their own supremacy and entitlement, that they do not realise how transparent the effects of those assumptions are to others, even if opaque to themselves. People who have grown up in a dominant culture and have never been subject to prejudice or marginalisation on the basis of race, religion, gender or physical or mental abilities have no idea how obvious and offensive their behaviour is to someone who has historically experienced discrimination and is therefore sensitised to such dynamics.

They behave with impunity, as if the object of their condescension or patronising behaviour is too stupid or unsophisticated to accurately interpret their signals. The reality is that anyone who has been on the receiving end of discrimination carries within them heightened sensitivity to shame and the potential for embarrassment and humiliation, and therefore an acute vigilance to any signs from others that they are from the persecuting group.

People who are sensitised to behaviour that shows prejudice carry inside them a little video camera that is constantly on the look-out for the look, the joke, or the accent which gives away the true attitudes or disparaging beliefs of the people they suspect of harbouring prejudice. They also carry a vast catalogue, based on personal experience and family and cultural memory that draw their attention to such behaviour and through which they confirm and validate their perceptions. This can be seen in how people protest when confronted with their prejudice and often point out as a defence that some of their best friends hail from the category that they are being accused of disparaging, thus only confirming the truth of the accusation.

It is important to acknowledge that regardless of how you would prefer to feel and perceive the world, it is exceedingly difficult to discern and be constantly aware of the types of attitudes and beliefs that you absorbed from the society in which you spent your formative years. A story that illustrated this point well was related to me a few years ago by a family who, for the first time, had black people living next door. Walking past one day, they saw their neighbour working in her garden and their four-year-old child asked why the "nanny" was cutting the flowers. In spite of the parents' best efforts to bring the child up to be non-racist, the child clearly was the product of an environment in which most black people were domestic workers. Parents can say what they like, but cannot control the perceptions of a child growing up in a society where black people live separate lives and only appear in servile roles, as was the case apartheid South Africa. On the other side of the dilemma you cannot rationalise away the feelings of black children who grew up seeing their parents marginalised, patronised and infantilised by while people.

Whether we like it or not, as we grow up we develop attitudes and beliefs that become filters that distort our ability to see the world as it is. Some of these we are taught, some we absorb by witnessing the beliefs and practices of our society. Some might be coherent with what we ourselves believe and some might contradict our preferred values. Because we are unaware of these beliefs, they function like computer programs operating in the background. Until we are confronted with their consequences, they remain to us completely opaque.

These taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions guide how we pay attention and direct us where to look and where not for wisdom, intelligence and skill. For example, when people are asked to assess CVs, they may unconsciously weight certain ones, either positively or dismissively, based purely on the basis of name. When looking for someone to hire, mangers may prefer someone from the outside the company who fits the cultural picture that they have in mind. The manger may fail to even notice or stop to consider how one of their direct reports who would be ideal for the position, because that employee belongs to the group from whom the manger does not expect to see potential.

We believe, for example, that the human resources manager has more insight into the company than the lady who serves the tea. I could show you cases in which the opposite is true. We tend to believe that people who have been educated at private schools and speak English with the "correct" accent are more intelligent than people whose English is not fluent. Showing off your potential in an English-dominated world when it is not your mother tongue is challenging. The victims of this blind-spot watch with despair as lesser skilled or less intelligent colleagues get ahead simply because they look and sound right.

In spite of the goodwill of many, it is these types of subtle issues that make people feel as invisible as the glass ceilings that block their progress. Because these issues are often so subtle and even concealed by the perpetrator's wish to appear righteous in their own eyes, they are easily dismissed, rationalised or justified.

There is, of course, the other side of the coin: This can also be a ghost in the system that makes its presence felt in many of the misunderstandings and accusations of bias and prejudice. The following scenario would be an example: In some societies, identity is constituted by belonging. In such societies, the interests of the collective take precedence over those of the individual. In Western society, particularly the environment of private schools, universities and business, the value of competition, that include notions like "rising to the top", "the best person wining"," each one for themselves" is most privileged and esteemed.  Attaining personal distinction and the ideal of standing out from the crowd even if it means succeeding at the expense of others is considered a fundamental ideal. Each society has its own rules about how the world works and what it means to get ahead. Combine the Western competitive mentality with financial incentives or promotional opportunities and you have a tough, if not overtly ruthless, environment.

People raised in more co-operative and community centred societies entering this dog-eat-dog world however, by contrast land up feeling invisible, frustrated and thwarted in their desire to get ahead. They look for tangible reasons to explain why their superiors seem to be taking credit for the juniors work, monopolising the kudos and actively preventing their juniors from rising past them in the ranks or beating them in the rat race. The most tangible explanation is that the superior's behaviour is personal. In seeking a reason why someone would have a personal bias or prejudice against them, they come up with the usual suspects: race, religion or gender. Their take on things, however, is a far cry from their superior's actual agenda. When confronted, the superior believes that the junior is merely using a convenient excuse for poor performance and an unwillingness to assume responsibility. The superior then expresses outrage and disgust about the junior trying to trump him with the "race or gender card". In the case of the junior, the senior's denial of the race issue is taken as a sign of his indifference to it. The challenge is to inculcate enough compassion and maturity into the situation so that the people involved realise that it's not personal, it's business.

To build genuine trust and positive regard, people have to learn to be really careful to avoid subtle slips in word and action and avoid stealing that metaphorical two percent, which translates into one hundred percent of a targeted person's dignity. What does someone do if they experience a dehumanising practice by a boss in front of colleagues or people who report to them? They might feel the barbs of sarcastic witticism despite their thinly disguised attempts to appear well-meaning, but how would they challenge them? How would they challenge being "accidently" left off a lunch invitation list, or some small slip amplified as an excuse to bring down their performance evaluation, or a colleague with less ability and performance being unfairly promoted over them out of favouritism?

How does one confront a game when its main rule is that everybody has to pretend that no game is being played? How does one use ones voice when it will lead to one to being labelled a trouble-maker and flagged as someone to be got rid of? How does one have this conversation with the reverence, compassion, honesty and respect that the subject deserves?

These are perplexing questions indeed. They need to be left kept open, so that the subject can remain part of an ongoing conversation. Any business leader who is serious about keeping all members of the organisation fully engaged and committed, needs to be mindful and alert to any dehumanizing practices, whether intended or naive that threaten the social fabric of the organisation. This is vital if leaders are serious about keeping all employees committed and engaged.