Professionalism
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Good Manners Begin with Respect
September 29, 2010
During the Great Depression, my father grew-up in a small rural town located in southeastern Kansas. Founded in the late 1800s, Pittsburg, KS was throughout the first half of the 21st Century an extremely productive coal mining community. Eastern European immigrants, the vast majority of whom were Roman Catholic, initially populated the small town. Those immigrants were eventually joined in the mines by a small number of African Americans who left the southern U.S. post-Civil War.
Of all the stories of his childhood that my father told me, none was more memorable than his recollections of the day the Ku Klux Klan stormed into Pittsburg. On at least that particular day, the target of the Klan was not Pittsburg’s African American community. Rather, the Klan rode into town alleging that a Catholic priest had hidden a small arsenal of guns underneath a church altar. It’s my memory that the priest invited anyone and everyone to inspect the church, and after no guns were found, the Klan quickly disappeared.
Over the past several months, as the media has focused on the building of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, I have often recalled my father’s childhood experience. There is something about tough economic times that causes some to become less tolerant of those who are “different.” Less than a century ago, those who professed the Catholic faith were viewed as operating out of the mainstream. Today, it appears that a growing number of Americans view practitioners of the Muslim faith in a similar light.
This issue of our ability to respect differences increasingly bubbles up in the workplace. According to the New York Times, a growing number of Muslim workers have complained about employment discrimination, from co-workers calling them “terrorist” to employers who ban headscarves or prohibit prayer breaks. It is believed that the number of complaints filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2010 will far exceed the number filed in previous years.
Yesterday, I spoke to a group of young professionals about the importance of good manners at work. I have long maintained that the basis for all good manners is respect. Surely part and parcel of respecting other people includes accepting the differences we might have.
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