Treating People With Dignity And Respect Makes a Decent Man

Earlier this week I hosted a webinar “A Matter of Power & Dignity: Resolving Conflict & Discrimination”.

This same week a row erupted in Washington following a verbal attack on the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by representative Ted Yoho on the steps of Capitol Hill. During the incident Ocasio-Cortez said Yoho called her a “Fucking Bitch”. Yoho denies this. But a reporter for The Hill witnessed the exchange and confirmed Ocasio-Cortez’s version of events.

Yoho later gave an apology of sorts, but Ocasio-Cortez rejected it in a very impressive speech in which she “expertly explained sexism to the world”, in the view of Vogue Magazine.

During the speech she talks of power and of dignity and argues “treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.”

Ocasio-Cortez speaks as someone who is conscious of her own self-worth, her own sense of dignity. She says she does not need or want his apology, and she is easily able to resist his attack. In this way she shows the power of dignity. It gave her the power to fight the injustice and overcome the power of the attacker.

Providing the provocation in the webinar I hosted this week was Donna Hicks, author of two books on the topic of dignity and an Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. She is an expert in conflict resolution and speaks about leading with dignity which is also the title of her second book.

There were three responses to the provocation. I gave one of them. My response was in the form of story by Samantha Power, an expert in human rights and international affairs who served for 4 years as President Barack Obama’s human rights adviser and then as US Ambassador to the United Nations. The story was recently published an autobiographical book, The Education of an Idealist.

Chapter 4 is titled “Dignity”. It begins with a description of her first day at her new high school in America. She realised she was not the only new starter. Hundreds of African American students were also starting. Their arrival was controversial and considered newsworthy. Reporters were there to cover the story.

Their arrival was one episode in a “long-running fight between black and white Atlantans over the areas public education system”. The year was 1972, 18 years after racial segregation in public schools had been deemed unconstitutional.

The County authorities has done little to address the issue over the 18 years, so the school Samantha started at had remained 80% white. Another 11 years after Samantha’s first day, in 1983, more than three hundred African American families had signed up to send their children to the school. The school district refused them, the excuse being the need to maintain student/teacher ratios. It took another 5years, and a legal case, for the issue to be resolved in 1988.

Samantha describes this as “a lesson in the denial and assertion of dignity”, adding that the whole experience opened her eyes to her new country’s “struggle to manage difference”. The reason I shared the story was to illustrate that whilst dignity cannot be given to someone — because it is theirs already under international law — they can be denied the agency to exercise their right. Agency in this sense meaning, the capability to act or exert power or influence in pursuit of what is rightfully theirs.

Denial, I argued, is always the result of an abuse of power, whether intentional or unintentional, by one individual over another — or by a group of parents, a school authority, or some other institution in Samantha’s story.

The point I wanted to stress about the story Samantha tells is that change requires action. Doing nothing perpetuates the problem.

It is not the single incident of one police officer suffocating someone he arrested that is most damaging to society. Nor the abuse of one politician by another. It is the inaction of the silent majority who do nothing to address systematic institutional racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination and injustice within their own companies, organisations, and communities that does the greatest damage.

In is this behaviour that denies millions their right to a life of dignity. It represents a silent but persistent attack on a person’s sense of self-worth. It slowly grinds them down. Not hiring or promoting certain people, paying them less than others doing the same job, and paying less attention to their opinions in meetings. These are common attacks on a person’s sense of self-worth, their dignity. Such actions are every bit as abusive as foul language, perhaps even more so. And such actions are certainly far more common.

Our ‘leaders’ need to provide leadership on these issues. They simply do not deserve to be called leaders if they “struggle to manage difference” or to act against those who abuse their power.