I can’t help recalling a couple of lines from the Unitarian Jihad:

Just because you believe it’s true doesn’t make it true.
Just because your motives are pure doesn’t mean you are not doing harm.

Like Clark and Dave, we’re not trying to tell people what they should believe. We’re just trying to get them to recognize what they believe, understand how it was influenced by their culture, and see how it’s contributing to their current emotional reaction. We want them to identify and manage it. Kind of hard to do when you’re 20 and getting shot at but it’s worth a try.

At a neighborhood grocery in Paris, on vacation, I started to pick out a pear. The woman running the shop told me “Non, non!” then asked if I’d be eating it that day or the next. Then she picked out the pear.

That’s the way it worked, at least at that shop, disconcerting as it might be for a pick-it-yourself American.

In a different context, here’s how a former boss handled the usually-dreadful “diversity training” at GE:

We’re in a tough competitive world. We need all the top talent we can find. So as a company we don’t want to discourage anyone from working for us because they don’t feel accepted due to things that don’t matter to us as a company.

So we’re going to talk about certain workplace behaviors. Some of them are illegal, and people who engage in this behavior are breaking the law.

Other behaviors that aren’t illegal are still contrary to our company policy. So we’ll talk about what the policies are and give examples of how certain behaviors can violate that policy.

…Without saying so exactly, the approach was “if you act as though women shouldn’t be in certain jobs at GE, you’re hindering our ability to hire and retain the best people–and we have a problem with that.”