Should an Organization Celebrate Inclusive Events?

I start this Dialogue with a question: Should an Organization Celebrate Ethnic, Religious or Other Inclusive Events?

I Googled this and found an extraordinary number of these possible Events.  They array through all sorts of groups, including:

• Our heritages (i.e. what countries we come from)
• Our religions
• Our gender
• Our sexual preferences
• Our work history (including, for example, military service)

Other things hard to categorize (e.g. National Pig Day, which I personally like, since my wife and I collect pigs 🙂 )

And probably there are many more.  I suspect almost every day is celebrating something.

Also, it seems like more of these get added every year in an attempt to help people feel good about the groups to which they belong.

To make the discussion herein easier I define any of these events as an “Event”.

Notwithstanding the positive – inclusive — intent here, I wonder if these are Events are doing the reverse by mistake.  Let me start with a quick back-story:

I have a relative who was in the military.  He was (very) proud to serve his country.  That was a few years ago.  Now he has another job.  At his organization there was celebration/announcement of an Event that was announced the day before Veterans Day.  Then on Veterans Day there was silence.  And then the day after Veterans Day there was another Event announced.

Was the organization slighting the military?  I doubt it.  I think they suspected that bestowing reverence on our military might upset others, so they just kept quiet about it.

Was my relative hurt and bent out of shape?  Well he wasn’t in deep despair, but it did make him feel neglected and wonder:  Why were other Events celebrated but not his?  He related this to me and it generated my thought process here as I started to wonder about where all this ends and whether organizations promulgating the celebration of Events is a good idea.  And the more I think about it I wonder.

My sense is that when you delve deeply into what it means to be “inclusive,’ there is usually an implied ‘exclusion.’

It stems from our natural human instinct to ‘group’ ourselves.  We are all proud to be part of certain groups, but if you think what a group of persons means, it is partially so one can feel the contentment and protection of being part of that group and partially also so that one can exclude others from it.  I mean it is hardly a group if everyone in the world is in it.

So now apply this to organizations celebrating Events.

The goal is to make the people relevant to the organization – employees, customers, etc. (collectively, “Constituents”) feel good and recognized.

But unless the organization very carefully includes every possible Event, there is the risk that some Constituents will feel excluded, hurt or worse.

To make matters even more fraught with issues, celebrating some Events are antithetical to others.  We have seen:

• Columbus Day – revered by Italian Americans – yet a source of concern to Indigenous People
• The military – which I just mentioned.  Some love and respect our military, yet others do the opposite.
• And dare I say any celebration (or non-celebration) of either Jewish heritage or Palestinians right now would cause quite a stir, wouldn’t it?

More practically, with so many groups nowadays and the many streams of information, it might be a good protection for an organization to step out of this maelstrom and do the following:

Permit everyone who is a Constituent of the organization to celebrate and venerate any Event they like on their own recognizance, but not have the organization itself back these Events.

Is that the best result for everyone?

Or am I just totally wrong here and this will end up upsetting everyone for the reverse reason.

Thoughts are welcome here.

 

Bruce – from The Bruce Philosophical Project