But generalizations are sadly how much of the world operates and how many of our interactions transpire, whether we dare to admit it. Take my exchanges on the side of the road. A Jeep in a white, middle-class suburban town. Moll Flanders. Settlers of Catan. Limbless Boba Fett. A lanky twenty-something. Casual tone. Quirky. Headed to Nathan’s.
Appearance-wise, I’m the least threatening person to ever be pulled over, and I took advantage of that. I made the officers laugh – ha-ha – and saved a few bucks on a ticket. But I wonder how differently this encounter might have gone if I weren’t the benign, entertaining, kind-of-nerdy but kind-of-nice, hot-dog eating punch line on the side of the road. What if I were a different age, race, or gender, with a dissimilar temperament driving in a different economic climate to attend to a more urgent matter? Would the officers have responded in jest and written off my ticket? Would I have dared to try and make them laugh?
These questions, and the fact that so much is predicated upon first appearances, are something I grapple with intellectually. I work to avoid drawing conclusions based on what I see, and I encourage others to do the same, despite knowing how impossible it can be at times. It’s so easy and natural to make assumptions and judgments without conscious realization. This judgmental predisposition is hard-wired into our psyches, and we likely wouldn’t be here if it were not. I suspect that infanticide rates would increase a hundredfold if that screaming, crying, pissing little fucker in the room next door resembled a monkfish. It’s long been known that an infant’s cuteness is its greatest defensive mechanism.
… and on some abhorrent level, I feel it’s mine.
My baby face (I find this term to be insulting, for the record; if I started telling my colleagues that they have geriatric faces, I don’t think it would go over so well) is something I use to my advantage on a daily basis, obscuring the judgmental monster within. And, like all observable generalizations, my innocent appearance doesn’t just get me out of tickets, but it also carries baggage, especially in the classroom when my adult students enter the room and wonder why their professor is twelve.
It usually takes a couple of weeks of rigorous reading and writing assignments for my students to realize that I know the material, am well prepared, and care a great deal about their academic and professional successes (and, surprise, that I’m not twelve).
One of the texts we often tackle is taken from Maya Angelou’s excellent autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. We dissect a chapter in which the young and impressionable Margaret begins working for Mrs. Cullinan, a person one student categorized as a “fat, racist bitch.” Barring the expletives, the student was right in her assertion that Mrs. Cullinan is a racist bully. I often follow up with asking why Margaret at first pities this person we judge so harshly: why does Margaret go so far as to say she wants to write a tragic ballad about Mrs. Cullinan “on being white, fat, old and without children”?
“Well, because Margaret doesn’t know Mrs. Cullinan yet,” someone will usually say. “But she does by the end of the chapter. Getting to know people takes work.”
The thing about stereotypes is that they’re not always negative, as with the babies we don’t murder. Christine will see an old man crossing the street with a cane and yell, “Aww!” I will see a middle-aged woman selecting ingredients from the salad bar at Ruby Tuesday, and I’ll suddenly want to burst into tears. Why? The old man hasn’t earned Christine’s sympathy any more than the woman scooping croutons onto her arugula has earned mine. Yet we throw our emotions onto them without rationality or context. This veiled sentimentality exists in daily life, and it can be as dangerous as the negative stereotypes in its selectivity.
Fortunately, like most societal injustices, it can be overcome with diligence and compassion. As noted, Margaret gets to know the real Mrs. Cullinan over the course of Margaret’s employment, and the chapter ends with an act of liberation that is as satisfying as anything that’s been written on the page. I see the same thing happen in my classroom. Hours turn to days, to weeks, to months, and the appearances fade, replaced with rich intellectual discussions on literature that transcend the boundaries of space and time. My students and I get to know one another – the real beings, inside these complex skins – and the corporal impressions evaporate, replaced by a deeper, richer understanding.
Understanding. This is what I long for. At every level of society.
My God, one day I’ll live in an America where seeing is not believing, where first impressions do not dictate law, and where every person can get out of a traffic violation with a hot dog.
Matt Paczkowski has an MFA degree in English from Hofstra University. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Welter, Devilfish Review, Embers Igniting, Spittoon Magazine, and Narrateur: Reflections on Caring. He currently teaches composition at The City College of New York and is a fiction reader for Windmill Literary Journal.