At our Diversity Dialogue on 5 May, the topic chosen by the participants was Poverty in South Africa. The theme of conflicting values came up throughout the dialogue. We realised there is a conflict between the values we aspire to generally for our society and what we are aiming to achieve ourselves, e.g. we want poverty alleviated as long as we don’t have to sacrifice something ourselves, as women we want leadership positions for ourselves but we don’t necessarily want women in authority over us, we want to encourage black people to value themselves but we prefer white teachers or schools for our children, we say we value menial labour as much as university careers but we are not willing to pay the salary that reflects that value.
How do we live with this inner conflict?
