Who Decided What Was Normal?

There's a phrase that can end a conversation before it has properly begun.

That's not normal.

Three little words, usually delivered with remarkable confidence.

I've always found them fascinating.

Because whenever somebody tells me something isn't normal, I want to ask a slightly irritating question.

Normal where?

Normal when?

And, perhaps most importantly, normal according to whom?

I was born in Nigeria and now live in Britain. One thing I've learned is that normal is remarkably well travelled. It can change completely when you cross a border, yet somehow retain its absolute certainty.

What is perfectly ordinary in one community can be considered peculiar in another.

The way we greet people. The way we raise children. What we wear. How we express respect. How we understand family, authority, beauty and success.

None of us finds our own version particularly strange.

That's rather the point.

The trouble with familiar

We often mistake familiarity for correctness.

When something has always been done a particular way, it begins to feel as though that way must have some special authority.

We stop asking why.

Consider how often we hear these expressions in workplaces:

That's not very professional.

They wouldn't be a good fit.

That's just how things are done here.

Sometimes those statements describe perfectly legitimate expectations.

But sometimes they conceal something else.

An accent we aren't accustomed to hearing.

A hairstyle that doesn't resemble the ones we've traditionally associated with authority.

A communication style that feels unfamiliar.

A person who doesn't behave like the people who have always occupied a particular position.

And suddenly, our personal preferences have become professional standards.

It's an extraordinary promotion, when you think about it.

One minute something is simply what we're used to.

The next minute, it's the rule by which everybody else is judged.

How difference becomes a hierarchy

While developing my talk, Rewritten – The Stories We Didn't Choose, I kept returning to a particular sequence.

Difference → Meaning → Hierarchy → Normal.

It begins with difference.

Human beings notice differences. We always have. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

The trouble begins with the meaning we attach to them.

One way of speaking becomes educated. Another becomes inferior.

One appearance becomes respectable. Another becomes inappropriate.

One tradition becomes sophisticated. Another becomes primitive.

And once we've attached those meanings, we begin organising people around them.

We create hierarchies.

We decide who belongs, who leads, who is trusted, whose knowledge counts and whose way of living deserves recognition.

Eventually, those decisions become embedded in our institutions, our language and our expectations.

Then something remarkable happens.

We forget they were decisions.

We start calling them normal.

History has a way of exposing us

This is one reason I find history so important.

Not because it provides a comfortable collection of heroes and villains. It rarely does.

But because history reminds us that many things previous generations considered perfectly reasonable now leave us wondering how anybody could have believed them.

And yet, the people who defended those ideas often believed they were protecting common sense, tradition or the natural order.

They weren't necessarily waking up each morning asking how they could make the world more unjust.

Many were simply defending the world as they understood it.

That should make us uncomfortable.

Because it raises an obvious question.

What are we defending today that future generations will struggle to understand?

What do we currently call normal that is really just familiar?

What have we inherited without examining?

And who is paying the price for our reluctance to ask?

Black History Month is about more than remembering

October brings an opportunity to revisit these questions.

Black History Month rightly creates space for people and achievements that have too often been overlooked.

But I think its value goes further than adding missing names to the historical record.

It invites us to examine the record itself.

Who decided which stories were worth preserving?

Whose achievements were considered significant?

Whose knowledge was treated as knowledge?

Whose experiences became the standard against which everyone else's experiences were measured?

And perhaps the most difficult question of all:

How much of what we believe about the world have we actually examined for ourselves?

It's possible to celebrate diversity while continuing to judge everybody against the same narrow definition of normal.

We can put different faces in our brochures, invite different voices onto our platforms and congratulate ourselves on how inclusive we've become.

But if everybody must still think, speak, behave and present themselves in exactly the same way to be accepted, what have we really changed?

The photograph?

Or the thinking?

Not everything familiar is wrong

I should be clear about something.

I'm not suggesting we abandon every tradition or challenge every standard simply because it exists.

Some standards protect people. Some traditions connect generations. Some expectations help us work together.

And difference alone doesn't automatically make something better.

But surely we should be able to explain why a standard exists.

If a workplace rule is about safety, let's talk about safety.

If it's about competence, let's measure competence.

If it's about fairness, let's demonstrate fairness.

But if the only explanation we can offer is “We've always done it this way,” perhaps we haven't explained very much at all.

Perhaps we've simply described the problem.

The questions worth asking

I think we could all benefit from becoming a little more curious about the things we take for granted.

The next time somebody behaves differently from what we expect, perhaps we could resist the immediate temptation to correct them.

We could ask what we're actually responding to.

Is something harmful?

Is something ineffective?

Or is it simply unfamiliar?

Those are three very different things.

And they deserve three very different responses.

This matters in leadership, education, recruitment and public life. It matters wherever one group of people has the authority to decide what everybody else should look like, sound like or aspire to become.

It also matters in the stories we tell ourselves.

Because the world we inherit isn't necessarily the world we must preserve.

We are allowed to examine it.

We are allowed to question it.

And when necessary, we are allowed to rewrite it.

We didn't choose every story we inherited. But we can choose which ones we keep telling.

So, the next time someone tells you something isn't normal, perhaps ask them a question.

Who decided what normal was?

You might be surprised how often nobody knows the answer.