Tabula Rasa

So I was thinking about it the other day and I think that no matter who you are... somebody probably assumes the worst about you. And its not because they think you're an idiot or because you stabbed them in the back at work.

In fact, I would say it's a Southern thing, but its not. Its a universal way that people identify each other. Its about culture and color and accents and comfort levels and how all of that dictates the way you think about everyone you meet in America.

First, History: The United States is possibly the only country that doesn't have its own cultural history beyond four or five generations. That means that the lines we draw between us and the groups that we form are quite different from those in other countries.

I postulate that part of the reason we are this way has to do with the fact that most of us came here under those exact circumstances. We "tired, poor, huddled masses" all shipped ourselves over and forced the only existing culture (native americans) into extinction. We formed huddled masses of our own. We segregated ourselves around what we knew. Pilgrims and Indians and Irish and German and Polish and Puerto Rican and Egyptian and Somalian and Kurdish. The passage of time allows for generational shifts and ethnic mixing, but we all have communities. Some communities are just older than others.

Personally, I've been noticing discrimination a lot more than I used to. Even my own discriminiations. Partially I think the reason I've never noticed it before has to do with the fact that I'm white. White Americans don't notice discrepancies in race relations as much as people from other backgrounds. Possibly, deep down, white people think they are SUPPOSED to be the majority because that's the way things have always been. And when a large group of "Other" comes in, they think somethings wrong. And things that are really more related to socioeconomics get labeled racial issues. Gangs, drugs, and public housing to name a few. These kinds of labels separate people. They form barriers that become sharpened and intensified by dialectical differences, differences of popular culture, and the perpetuation of unrealistic yet commonly accepted stereotypes.

"Recitatif" was Toni Morrison's only published short story, and it blew my mind in college.
The whole story is a series of five events in the lives of two women who are identified within the first paragraph as being of different races, black and white. The reader is the left, unbeknownst to him or her in most cases, to draw their own conclusions about who is black and who is white. While reading the story it is impossible not to picture the girls and intone your own opinion based on the events in the story.

Read it. It's amazing.
One student in my college class remarked that he thought one of the girls was black because the story mentioned that her hair smelled strange. Another remarked that it must have been a story about how a young black girl, obviously Roberta, they said, defied the odds and became wealthy and successful. Still another mentioned that Twyla must have been white because she couldn't remember what race a friend of theirs from school was. "White people don't notice people's color as much as black people," she had said.

Holy cow, Toni Morrison was a GENIUS for writing that story. The stereotypes in our heads were all going mad trying to tell us who was who and what was what, and none of it was even correct. She stripped right and wrong answers and let us see that the tools we use to identify people were often made of stereotypes.

People are a product of their experiences.

First generation Latin guys might call me a "bad girl" because they think white girls are "crazy." They see MTV, and they listen to pop music, and they see all the "freedom" and "equality" and they call us "bad" because we're just as capable of doing stereotypically male things as they are. And its all commonly accepted here. Sushiboy might have asked me for casual sex because I casually slid him my number underneath my plate at the sushi place while I was there with one of my guy friends. That guy in class might have said Roberta's hair meant she was black because one time he sat next to a fellow student on the bus who happened to be both black and overdoing it on the hair product.

Empiricism is the rule.

Its just not fair that we can't start with clean slates. Tabula rasa. I mean, I want to SO BADLY. And the older I get the more I realize that life is like a huge snowball of experiences. You keep going further and further down this big hill picking up all sorts of baggage and its like... Where does this end??? What's at the bottom of the hill? Why is it that when someone meets you they throw all their baggage on you and dress you up based on their experiences until you don't even look like yourself at all. You look like whatever they think you do.

Don't let your baggage determine who somebody else is. Everything you assume about anything and anyone is often a product of your mind alone. Though you may take credit for any truth you find, the link between your assumption and the truth is usually one big fat myth.

So anyway. What I'm trying to say is we should give each other more credit. Somebody I was talking to the other day said he travels to Latin America on a regular basis and he loves it there.
"It makes me feel like a Christian," he said. "And everything here is like... if you ask to stay with someone's family they're not sure. They're not hospitable. They get suspicious. And everything just..."
"--has to be a certain way," I finished.
"Yes!" he said.

Its true. Sure. People are the sum of their experiences. But don't let your experiences keep you from change. There is a big world out there. And you do NOT know everything.

Challenge yourself. Let go of your baggage and allow people to prove themselves beyond their own. Suspend your disbelief. Believe in something. Believe in the goodness of people and treat them well.

It will make you feel better.