You Should Be Noticing Differences In Others
Your friends are different from you. So are your coworkers. And your classmates. Don’t forget the people that you run into at the grocery store are pretty different too. What good comes from ignoring that?
The whole idea of believing we are being progressive in some way by claiming we never have preconceived ideas about a person before getting to know them or claiming “I don’t see color” is outdated and just plain wrong. Plenty of more qualified people have addressed the latter, so I’ll focus on the former. We all have biases and subconscious expectations of others based on those biases, and it is not productive to ignore them rather than acknowledging them.
That absolutely does not mean we should cling onto our beliefs in harmful stereotypes or allow all of our internal biases to run our lives, that’s obviously a problematic and woefully unadventurous way to live. Only by acknowledging that we have a bias, maybe sharing it with others, and then dissecting why we have that idea in our heads and how it affects our choices can we live in a more fulfilling and inclusive way. I’ll use this opportunity to talk through some of my own biases and how I believe they have affected my choices. I will admit I have a negative bias against people who type a certain way. When I see the wrong “your” or “there” or the person is shortening all of their words when they type I have an automatic thought that “oh. I’m definitely more intelligent than this person”. That’s not a nice thing to acknowledge about myself and sit with knowing I instinctively judge that quickly for something so minor, but seeing it and addressing it is the only way to change that mindset.
Now I can choose to keep that mindset now that I’m aware of my own bias, or I can choose to change how I think about the situation. Text speak, in this instance, is a whole new form of language that follows different rules and allows for the shortening of words for the sake of ease with technology. It simply has nothing to do with intelligence and my automatic assumption that it does only exposes my own narrow thinking.
Apply this to more serious or lighter biases as you see fit, the bias speaks more to the person who holds it than who it is against. All of us hold these biases, not a single person doesn’t have them it’s built in as a human. They aren’t harmful until they present in harmful actions, actions that we always have a choice to make and that is what brings bias to persecution. That is what makes bias the scary monster we’ve been taught to believe it can be and why people always want to claim bias is something that can’t touch them.
