All Yankees Fans Are Republicans
I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, one who didn’t stereotype or essentialize people.
But I realized when I was 19 that I had spent my whole life assuming that every Yankees fan disagreed with me politically.
Back up — I’m a born and bred Marylander whose first love was the Baltimore Orioles, and have spent my whole life assuming that the New York Yankees, and by extension their fans, were somehow inherently different from and clearly worse than me. To all my Yankees fans reading this, I feel inclined to tell you two things:
1) I don’t hold this belief anymore and I realize now in my wise old age of 26 how insane it was to begin with — and it was all subconscious if that helps anyone — and,
2) It wasn’t just the Yankees. It was the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Duke University Blue Devils and the Indianapolis Colts…any team that was the rival team of one of my teams
So why am I just listing off a bunch of sports teams that are wildly popular and then denigrating them and their fans? Why am I of the opinion that saying someone who holds opposing political beliefs is worthy of denigration?
Well, it’s less of a reflection of the teams or the political parties in question. It’s a matter of evolution.
Early man (or woman) was naturally selected to survive if he (or she) was scared of change and difference. Homo sapiens who ran away when they noticed that the grass near them was disturbed were more likely to survive than ones who stayed — because of the presence of the lion who disturbed the grass.
Biologically speaking, we are afraid of what’s different. I was recently told by a Cross Cultural Competencies expert that it takes 250 milliseconds after seeing someone for the first time to determine if they are a human or not. And then another 250 milliseconds for our brain to register if this person is “the same as me” or “different from me.”
That’s right — it takes our brains the same amount of time to figure out “human” or “anything else” as it does “like me” or “scary.”
It’s not such a stretch when you think about it like this — of course we all essentialize, we make snap decisions and they’re often wrong. It’s not these decisions that make us bad people — it’s how we act on them. And I’ve never mistreated a rival fan because of my ill-conceived belief that they were different.
Unless you count trash talk as mistreatment.
Listen to this week’s episode, Bells, Beethoven, and Art:
Written by Louis Reich of Comatose.
Comatose is a weekly series of amusing anecdotes, insightful commentary, and pithy stories. Every week three contributors are featured in short segments. The segments, though often unrelated, are tied together using music and narration to set the scene. Relax and enjoy the ride while listening to topics as varied as love, birthdays, and reciprocity.
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