Exploit or Include
I was in a Costco checkout line with my father, probably 15 years ago. If you knew him, you knew his Indian accent never really faded. You also knew he was a serious, educated man — multiple master’s degrees in engineering, and a PhD he would have finished if he hadn’t needed to support my mother, in a country they’d both just immigrated to.
He was just standing there, paying our bill, when the cashier started talking to him like he was a child. Like he had the intellect of a bushel of corn. She talked down to him because she could — because he was a minority with an accent, and she wasn’t. I suppose she may have been having a bad day, or was just a foolish teenager, rather than being a bigot — but she still stole his dignity, and I saw this happen to my parents countless times when I was growing up.
That’s what exploitation really is. Finding someone you can treat badly without consequence, and doing it anyway.
There are certain people we’re all allowed to treat this way without reproach. It’s just a matter of who. Wait staff, customer service agents — anyone in the service industry, really. Any minority, whether by race, religion, sexual orientation, or age. People with disabilities. Foreigners. People without a fixed address. People without a college education. People in poverty. Interestingly, it’s also acceptable in some circles to treat wealthy people badly. Sometimes the reasons are obviously contrived, like a middle school bully picking on a kid for wearing glasses or the wrong brand of jeans. Or, in the biggest farce of ego and power of our time, people who work “under” us in a corporate hierarchy.
I’ve come to think of these exploitations less as a long tail of isms, and more as one way of being. Call it racism, ableism, classism — any ism is essentially the same thing: someone who sees a chance to exploit without consequence, and takes it. I doubt that cashier was born evil. She just saw an opening.
Inclusion is the opposite. It’s finding those same people we could exploit without consequence, and choosing instead to make them part of us, and us part of them. It’s a deliberate elimination of the opportunity to exploit another person. To include requires us to do something to care for and become equal with another living being.
If you want to know someone’s character, put them in front of someone the culture allows them to treat badly, and watch what happens. Add pressure. Tell them a story about something being stolen from them. See what happens. The tendency to blame, exploit, and demean — or the tendency to take responsibility, include, and elevate — shows up fast. We are put into rooms like these, where we’re allowed to treat someone badly without reproach, every day of our lives
When under pressure, do I exploit or include? It’s the simplest moral test there is. And it’s one we have to run on ourselves every single day.
