It’s very difficult not to be a racist in this city. Officially, DC’s population is 66% black; where I live, grocery shop, and the way I commute it’s probably more like 85% black, 5% Hispanic, and 10% white. Every day, about ninety percent of the bad behavior I see is perpetrated by black people: the Stroller Lady, who treats her three year-old daughter worse than I’d treat a dog, the Raggedy-Ann Wig lady who’s wearing a pile of cornrow braids that are definitely made out of some plant or petrochemical based material that smells like it hasn’t be washed in years, the bus driver who’d rather talk to the lady from his church than, you know, drive the bus, the woman who’s too busy talking on her cell phone to not leave her shopping cart in the middle of the aisle, the guy sitting in two seats, eating fried chicken and throwing the bones out the bus window.
Based on the way I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t look like me act, it’s probably close to a miracle that I’m not a racist. I am, however, a bit smarter than the average bear. To be a racist based on the things I’ve seen would buy into the other fallacy of generalization: that people who look like me think like me and believe the same things I do.
American culture is more than a bit twisted. It tells us simultaneously that we are unique and special flowers, unlike anyone else on the planet, all the while its fingers pull and poke and prod trying to mold our bodies into some impossible Barbie shape (witness: Fox’s The Swan) even as its propaganda rapes our minds and tries to convince us that we need stuff in order to be loved (the lifestyle porn of Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, and Williams Sonoma among others).
Now, I know I’m probably not completely unique, and there are a lot of things about me that are common to many people of my age group (the music of our high school years, the movies we snuck into during junior high, the cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings as kids), but I probably don’t think exactly the same way someone of my age, race, and gender thinks.
What is it about humans that pushes us to generalize, that keeps us from reacting to people as individuals based on the way they behave? Is it that we’re just incapable of assimilating the amount of information it would take to react to someone as an individual rather than a category, or is it that we (human beings) weren’t really meant to live in groups as large as we do (ie: cities) and this generalization is a natural defense mechanism?
I’ve no particular answers; it’s just something I’ve been chewing on randomly.
Hi Woodstock –
You ask, “what is it about humans that pushes us to generalize…” This is something I’ve also been considering, under a very different heading. (Great minds……etc.?) That is – our brains are constructed and optimized for pattern recognition. The over-simplified reason for this is that we have no time to deal with the chaos that ‘reality’ around us pours into our input devices. It’s categorize or die.
(That lovely little “Oh” expression so often on babies faces during their first months may be really, “Oh shit….”)
Anyhow – our pattern-recognition wetware has various settings from seeing no patterns to seeing them everywhere. Both extremes are non-functional. Most of us, fortunately fall more toward the center of the curve. But we can’t avoid receiving experience through these patterns – templates. We can, however, recognize the process and work with it.
Well, this is a quick and much too facile comment – but there it is.