To Err Is Human By Mary Palac
Often in hospitality we talk about the care we provide our guests, the experiences we want to cultivate for them. We share stories, jokes, anything to make a genuine connection over a delicious cocktail. For the most part, the humor is good-natured, because we all aspire to be great hosts, but as I reflect back, I wonder just how many times I’ve crossed the line for the sake of a good time.
How often do we reconcile with the harm we may have done to few, while trying to entertain the masses?
Because we are conditioned to serve and appeal to the “regular” folk, this often means assimilating into white cis-hetero normative culture, even if that means doing harm to our own identities.
Case in point, I am an Asian American woman who has performed yellow-face at an industry event. I wore a hat with a long fake braid, and a long paper mustache, and pretended I was the operator of a Chinese Opium Den in the Wild West because I thought it was FUN. I thought that people would find it entertaining…and they did. I look back now and realize the people that I was trying to entertain are exactly the people who made my culture a caricature in the first place, and here I was perpetuating it.
This is probably an extreme example of the harm that we are capable of, but even in our day to day, it is important to ask ourselves if we can we look back at all the things we’ve said, all the jokes we’ve made, and not find a single time where our entertainment was at the expense of someone’s identity. How long has it really been since you’ve heard the phrase, “That’s so gay,” in a derogatory way? Or called a friend a “pu**y” for not wanting to take a shot?
Adjusting this kind of behavior takes time and, even more so, practice. We have to retrain our minds to be mindful, not just for the person who may sit before us, but also for the person whose humanity we erase when we don’t take the time to feel the weight of the words that we say. For many of us, even the marginalized, we have lived to assimilate for so long that every part of us is trained to reach for higher in the hierarchy of humanity. We have been conditioned to step over others to achieve greatness.
So how do we combat this behavior? How do we strive to live up to the true meaning of hospitality, welcoming and embracing all? We start by owning up to our mistakes, our missteps, and recognizing that all of us, even the kindest welcoming stars in our industry, are all capable of doing harm. We feel the weight of the damage we might have caused and in those feelings of guilt we find the determination to do better.
By holding ourselves accountable we take small steps towards becoming the people we imagine ourselves to be and in each moment, when we reflect before laughing at an obscene joke or we decide to call out a problematic coworker who just commented on a woman’s body, we find a little forgiveness for ourselves for our own shortcomings. As we begin a new year, it’s the perfect opportunity for all of us to embrace our faults, find forgiveness and healing for ourselves, and practice and perfect a new level of hospitality, one that keeps everyone in mind, every day.
