Workforce Innovations

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An Introduction to Rankism
Dr. Robert W. Fuller

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20 ways to combat rankism

An executive pulls up to valet parking at a restaurant, late to a business lunch, and finds no one to take his car keys. Anxious and fuming, he spots a teenager running toward him in the rear-view mirror and yells, "Where were you? I haven't got all day."

He tosses the keys in the kid's general direction and they fall to the pavement. Bending to pick them up, the boy says, "Sorry, sir. About how long do you expect to be?"

The executive hollers over his shoulder, "You'll know when you see me, won't you?" The valet winces, but holds his tongue. Postscript: the teenager goes home and bullies his kid brother.

It's easy to multiply examples like these: a customer demeans a waitress, a coach bullies a player, a doctor disparages a nurse, a school principal insults a teacher, a teacher humiliates a student, students ostracize other students, a parent belittles a child, an officer abuses a suspect, a professor exploits a teaching assistant, a boss harasses an employee, a caretaker mistreats a person with a disability.

Most such behaviors have nothing to do with racism or sexism. Yet the effect on the victims is no different from how it felt to be Jewish, black, or gay until things began to change for those groups. The perpetrators of these insults, like racists and sexists, select their targets with circumspection. In each of these examples, what triggers unequal treatment is rank–rank as measured on the "somebody-nobody" scale.

"Somebodies" are sought after, given preference, lionized. "Nobodies" get insulted, dissed, exploited, ignored. Low rank, even when the ranking is clearly meretricious, functions exactly like race and gender–as an unjustifiable impediment to advancement.

All forms of abuse, prejudice, and discrimination are actually predicated upon differences in rank. Rank-based discrimination deserves a name of its own to distinguish it from racism, sexism, and bad manners. By analogy, we shall call it rankism. Once you have a name for it you see it everywhere.

Regardless of whether it occurs between groups or individuals, rankism is experienced first and foremost as an insult to dignity. Human beings everywhere have an innate sense that dignity is their birthright and are quick to detect affronts to it. In the words of Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Foundation, "Dignity is not negotiable."

Insults to dignity set in motion a psychological dynamic that commands people's attention and drains their energy. When we must defend our dignity in the workplace, productivity suffers. In schools, learning may be sacrificed. Recent studies linking social class to mortality and morbidity suggest that the chronic rankism experienced by the poor is as harmful to health as smoking 3 1/2 packs of cigarettes a day.

How can we minimize rankism in our personal interactions and social institutions? What would a "dignitarian" society–one that disallowed rankism–look like?

Despite noteworthy advances in designing models of governance that impose limits on those holding positions of power, many in both civic and social institutions continue to abuse their subordinates when they think they can get away with it. The cynicism previously reserved for politicians has spread to envelop the corporate world as well. News of another financial scandal is often met with shrugs, as if to say, "What did you expect?" And in both business and government, we act as if finding the right leadership would solve the problem. This is like hoping the heir to the throne will be more benevolent than the absolute monarch now sitting on it. Sometimes that does happen, but making those entrusted with power accountable is a far more dependable solution to the recurring problem of tyrannical or corrupt leadership.

In order to effect the overthrow of superstition and dogma, it was not enough for a few leading figures to inveigh against ignorance. A critical number of ordinary people also had to substitute knowledge, evidence and reason for unsubstantiated beliefs. Only then was a societal tipping point reached that we call the Enlightenment.

So it will be with the Dignitarian Era that will mark the removal of rankism's social sanction. The dismantling of rankism and the adoption of dignitarian governance models for our civic and social institutions–models that make their leaders accountable to those they serve–begins with each one of us in our personal relationships with relatives, friends, co-workers, teachers, and physicians. The larger transgressions we complain about–corporate and governmental corruption; bullying in the workplace, the marketplace, and among nations–differ in scale but not kind from the "little" abuses of power most of us permit ourselves. That is where we must start. Only when we have cleansed our individual relationships of rankism will there be the understanding and the will to challenge the broader forms of it that afflict us all.

Dr. Fuller is the former president of Oberlin College and the author of "Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank" and "Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity." He served as keynote speaker at the 16th Annual CONNECT! Alumni Awards Event in October.