Racism in Football needs to be made very welcome before it’s ever going to leave.
You don’t change the hearts and minds of the nation by making demons of public figures – that just allows everyone to distance themselves from Terry or to create more drama about how PC has no place on the pitch. The very way this is being dealt with and reported is likely to result in no real learning, no acknowledgement of our own prejudices and acts of discrimination and no real shift in the way we do things around here.
One major mistake across the whole Diversity field is to put enforcement over play, curiosity and learning.
3 things are necessary to shift embedded racist thinking:
1. A curiosity, personal inquiry and small group acknowledgement of what actually is stereotyping, prejudice and how it leads to micro and macro discrimination
2. A curiosity, personal inquiry and small group discussion around stereotypes or prejudices that individuals used to have but lost and the processes by which they lost or updated their own prejudice
3. A discussion across the group, in the light of the previous 2 inquiries, into what are a couple of changes that the organisation could make to policy and procedure that would mean that more prejudices were being updated more of the time
That is:
1. We all make hold stereotypes, have prejudices and engage in discrimination, during almost every interaction we have. What are some of yours? What are some you hold about other people?
2. What are some prejudices you used to have, no matter how outrageous, and how did you update them?
3. What would have to be happening in this organisation so that more of you were updating your prejudices more of the time?
Repeat steps 1 – 3 regularly until there is a tipping point in the organisation – usually at around 60% of individuals having gone through this inquiry.
For more information about the kinds of changes that come from this process visit my training website: http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/case-studies/community-case-studies/police-national-search-centre-%E2%80%93-reducing-prejudice-amongst-police-trainers
The processes developed from 2 sources:
1. I had taken the groundbreaking work of Maori/English psychotherapist David Grove and developed it into an application for creating collective trust and inspiring capability for a group to re-learn their own thinking and to develop new ways of doing things around here
2. Patrick Weekes, a respected Police Diversity trainer, and I, spent a long time inquiring into our own prejudices, those we still held, those we’d updated and considered what was it that kept us from allowing our prejudices to cloud our thinking
We took the process and our personal inquiry into other small groups as a ‘modeling’ exercise to find out “What is the difference that makes the difference.” To systems that ARE able to work really effectively within a diverse culture.
Much to our surprise we found that the nature of the inquiry in and of itself was creating the very changes we were hoping to effect!
So if FIFA.com – Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) really want to shift the way we think around here, a series of small, non-judgemental inquiries, consisting of groups of around 15 individuals drawn from diagonal slices across the organisation: management, players, administrators etc. in order to get curious about what is happening, what could happen and what people want to have happen next.
Share post
