My First Encounter with Prejudice

Have you ever felt devalued, unheard, or untrusted?

Recently, I was working with a customer who initially seemed open. He appeared to listen at first, but kept asking the same questions over and over, increasingly becoming more difficult and closed off to what I had to say. He asked to speak with someone else and pointed out one of my managers, so I grabbed my resource and stayed to see the journey through.

Staying was my biggest mistake and my biggest blessing. It helped me experience something I never had before, and also made me realize that as a country, we still have a long way to go.

Simply, the person I was working with needed a male perspective to tell him the exact same thing I already had. Not only that, once we were finished purchasing the product online, he asked some questions about a different product, and the same exact thing happened. It was ever so subtle, but glaringly obvious after he flagged the same person down only to have the same thing I had said be reiterated to him. This was infuriating for me.

The interaction was enough to throw me off for the remainder of my day and it wasn’t until I processed it with a friend in tears that I realized it bothered me so much because my voice, my expertise in what I do, and my advice was completely and utterly ignored simply because I was female.

Prejudice is defined as an unfair feeling of dislike for a person or group because of race, sex, religion, etc… In all of my life, I have never experienced prejudice until the other day. Maybe I have, but because my head is normally in the clouds, I have been blinded to it, never quite understanding what it means to be discriminated against or discredited simply because I am female.

This is where it hit home, though: In the last month, I’ve been taking in resources and books written and produced by black people, choosing to become educated about my privilege over complacent in it. My desire has been to empathize in greater capacity with the black community. Even after all this, I still can’t pretend to know, but my experience helped me come to this conclusion:

Racism and prejudice are both experienced and felt and if you haven’t experienced or felt either of them, that’s what my understanding of privilege now is.

Up until recently, I couldn’t rightfully say I know or pretend to know what it means to be discredited or prejudiced against because I am a woman, but now I know. If the experience I had is even a small fraction of what my colored friends experience on a daily basis because of something that they cannot control, then I can’t even begin to fathom or imagine just how exhausting it must be to feel like you are swimming upstream every single day.

I went home having simmered, but the damage had been done. I was exhausted. My insides still felt helpless and harmed. The interaction made me feel that my voice and expertise didn’t matter. There is nothing quite like being told in a blatant or even subtle way that my voice (or the space I take up) doesn’t matter; or that I am not worthy of being listened to or noticed (when I know deep down that the opposite is true). Here’s the reel of questions that began to spin inside my head:

— Are people really free if they live beneath the weight of that kind of prejudice every single day?

— Are people really able to find rest when something they cannot control is causing others to view them as less-than?

— How is it possible that this kind of behavior is simply tolerated?

— Why did bystanders not check in with me despite seeing what was going on?

And this is one I’ll be unpacking for a while:

— Is it possible I have contributed to the overall prejudice in our systems because my eyes weren’t opened until I blatantly experienced it for myself?

I cannot control that I was born a woman.

People of color cannot control the color of their skin.

Being biased against these things is prejudiced and unjust.

I’m beginning to see that what I can control is how much I continue to learn about the prejudice’s laced up inside the systems of our country.

I can control choosing to fight for justice and equality, using the voice I have to shed light on it.

I can control how I pick myself back up and move forward.

What transpired that day at work derailed me for the remainder of the day and it was really hard to dig myself out of the quick sand of my mind. However, at the end of the day, I ultimately recognized that the way I was treated said nothing about me, my heart, my voice and influence, or the work I do.

So the next morning I woke up, walked into work again with my head held high, and went on to have a nearly perfect day, because as it turns out, I’m still good at what I do and I have a knack for sales.