Like millions of other Trekkies I was bummed by the news of Leonard Nimoy’s death Friday. Star Trek was hands down my favorite show as a kid. Sure, I was into sci-fi in a big way, but what I loved most about the series was its portrayal of a kinder, gentler, more united future world.
There was a United Federation of Planets, everyone on Earth lived in peace, and nobody seemed to notice or care that Uhura was a black woman, Sulu was Asian, Chekov was a sort of wacky Russian, and Spock was a pointy-eared Vulcan (except when Dr. McCoy would go off on one of his “pointy-eared Vulcan” rants).
The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was a real visionary. Better yet, the guy had guts. So did NBC for running the show back during the feminist movement, Cold War era, and racially charged 60s.
While I doubt if most of you would remember the tag line from the Virginia Slims commercials of the time -- “You’ve come a long way, baby” -- I’d like to echo that sentiment and applaud how far we’ve come. In some ways we have come a long way. In other ways, not so much.
We are a fickle culture. We talk a good story about diversity and individuality while suppressing and bullying those with different viewpoints and acting out with angry posts and vitriolic rants all over the Web. And, yes, those are, in many cases, the same people talking out of both sides of their mouths.
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Another glaring example of our cultural duplicity is the way we rally against discrimination, all the while using software tools that filter job candidates based on gender and ethnicity to fill equal-opportunity quotas. We call that little bit of hypocrisy diversity recruiting.
And we love to typecast. We do. Not only are we forever pigeonholing, categorizing, characterizing, and labeling, much of the common wisdom about popular stereotypes is simply false. Here are a few examples:
We lump Gen Y, Gen X, and Baby Boomers into neat little generational bins as if everyone born within a certain time span shares the same cultural beliefs, behaviors, strengths, and limitations.
We characterize the eating and sleeping habits of wealthy, successful people like they’re caged animals in a zoo. Meanwhile, none of that stuff has anything to do with wealth creation or professional achievement. None of it.
We’ve branded Millennials as the entrepreneurial generation when, in reality, that’s a complete myth. Many Millennials may identify with entrepreneurship but, contrary to popular belief, there’s actually been a long-term decline in startup creation in America and that trend is most pronounced among the Millennial age group.