Surfaces

An acquaintance of mine asked me, not too long ago, if I'd grown tired of feeling that I "represented" Black people to the many White people that I encountered on a regular basis. It was an interesting question, and it gave me a moment to think about something that hadn't occurred to me in quite some time. My answer was that as far as most White people I encountered were concerned, I didn't represent Black people; rather I was an anomaly, and so was regarded as a somewhere between different, and the exception that proves the rule.

And that created an opening to talk about how people tend to see the people around them. I've related before how, back when I was still in my twenties, I regarded people who lived up to the stereotype of the casually criminal urban Black man as the enemy, people's whose wanton disregard for the rules of society threatened to make it impossible for me to build a life free from that selfsame stereotype. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that what other people think of me is, if not completely none of my business, far beyond my control, and learned to let it go. But I don't think that I'd ever put much effort into asking why, if someone observed both him, and me, that I should be tainted by said someone observing his bad acts, but he wouldn't be considered to have whatever non-stereotypical qualities that may have been seen in me.

Confirmation bias, it turns out, may very well result in nothing being actually seen at all. Instead stereotypes layer themselves over everything viewed, and become deeper and more comforting every time something can be considered to align with them. A person who is going to brazenly steal a necklace from a woman in broad daylight on a municipal light rail system is likely not all that concerned about how onlookers might take his actions and project them onto millions of people. The only reason I had that concern was that I'd been brought up to understand that the approval of the greater White society was important to have, yet difficult to obtain due to a combination of White prejudice and shiftless Black people who openly played into those selfsame prejudices. But those worries distracted me from what I should have been doing: understanding who I could interact with who was willing to see me for "who I really was" and shaping that into something that was of value to them. In other words, the best way to be seen as an individual is to find those people who see others as individuals, and hang around with them.

But that would have required me to do what I didn't expect others to be capable of. The central concept of the idea that I "represent" Black people to the White people I meet is that those White people are unwilling or unable to look past the surface traits of those they encounter. And my immediate answer, even though I had a couple of specific individuals in mind, betrayed that same thought process. Even after all this time, I've still bad at seeing beyond the surface. I suspect, then, that I shouldn't be so critical of others who have the same difficulty.