Prejudice and Pride
Every few days, at least once a week, I drive past a young guy walking in my neighborhood. I assume he lives nearby and is walking to or from work or school. I think he is sixteen or seventeen years old, but he could be older or slightly younger. He is thin and clean shaven and has blonde hair. Today he was wearing a black watch cap, a gray hoodie, and tight, straight-legged jeans, but on a nice day, he might wear a spring dress and make-up, or a pants suit and have his hair painted blue or pink. He marches to his own drummer. And I’m always happy to see him, the way seeing an unusual, brightly colored bird at the feeder in the morning makes me glad and brightens a day.
I mentioned this to my sister yesterday. “Have you ever noticed the young guy who walks through the neighborhood, who sometimes wears a dress?”
“Oh sure,” she said. “I love that kid.”
I was thinking about this recently while I was online shopping for fishing gear (new waders, leaders, a selection of flies) and a regulator for the driver’s side window of a 2004 Toyota Tundra. Redneck stuff. It occurred to me that I am pretty much the poster guy for everyone this kid has been told is dangerous and wants him dead. White, boomer, conservative, heterosexual, with grit under my nails, sun-damaged skin, and a three-day beard. Of course, the exact opposite is true. It makes me happy that I live in a country in which he can walk down the street wearing any damn thing he pleases.
On the other hand (and this is important), I am fully cognizant that I know absolutely nothing about this young man beyond what he chooses to wear. Nothing. Any motive, or feelings, or attitudes I imagine he carries; any ambitions I believe he has, any hopes and desires, are all projection. All just me, creating scenarios in my own head and ascribing them to a person I have never met. I’ll come back to this.
In years past we spent much time speaking of “prejudice” and when I was young myself it was roundly considered a very bad thing. Do not prejudge, we were told. Everyone is an individual. To a large degree, this has gone by the boards, and to the detriment of everyone. This cultural shift has happened by design. Projection has been normalized and is now part of our institutional and governmental life. Schools, agencies, institutions, and individuals are all encouraged to project away and to assume that everything about an individual can be understood in an instant, simply by seeing what they look like and assuming everything else. Why else would it be important that a Supreme Court justice be, first and foremost, a black woman or a “wise Latina”?
Some years ago, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve a semblance of happiness I would have to drag my ego out behind the barn and (as the old mobsters might say) put two in his hat. It just wasn’t going to do to live life pretending to knowledge and skills I did not have, or to travel through my days imagining I was the protagonist in a cosmic film and that, somehow, my struggle was the struggle that mattered most. I’ve had some success in this regard, but it is limited, because ego is a huge, hungry monster and no matter how many times I put it down it crawls back like some undead creature in a direct to DVD horror film. The first thing I understood clearly, though, about shedding my innate narcissism, was that to get anywhere near even partially losing my self-regard I would have to eliminate a phrase from my vocabulary completely. I would have to forever ban and then faithfully watch for the phrase: “You know what you ought to do?”
Inherent, baked right into that phrase, is the assumption that I know something important about an individual that they have missed. The truth is, I don’t know enough about anyone, even those closest to me, to tell them what they should do. Go to school, or don’t, or buy this car or that truck, or bond yourself to this person or that; I can tell you what I would do, but beyond that? What do I know? Not anyone’s struggle. Not their hopes. Not their fears. Not their mistakes or their successes. Nothing that remotely qualifies me to direct their actions.
However, we have empowered hundreds of thousands, maybe millions to do exactly this. We have credentialed and elected them, deemed them “experts” and loosed them on the world with the implied message that directing others is their purpose. They should go out into the world and tell everyone exactly what they ought to do, in order to “make a difference”, and many have risen to this challenge and believe this is their raison d'être.
It never ends well. “Everyone ought to own a home” brought us Ninja (No job, no income) mortgages and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. “Everyone ought to go to college” brought us student debt and useless degrees. It goes on and on and on. You can easily think of your own examples. Everyone ought to stop using transfats, drinking soda, owning guns, supporting the police, using shopping bags, driving SUVs, and they ought to start wearing masks, eating vegetables, getting regular exercise, recycling…
This is nothing new, of course. I was very young when I first realized that the human brain, our imagination, was the most powerful and engaging toy ever created, and most problems arose because so many wanted to play with everyone’s toy but their own. This knowledge didn’t prevent me from becoming an egoist myself, though, and believing the world would be so much better if only I was giving directions. That way lies madness.
This madness has been mainstreamed. And we took it one step further. We accepted a class of people telling the rest of us exactly what we ought to do, well beyond the limits of law, but then—crazier still—we began to accept the prejudices of the expert class as valid. Where I see the young guy wearing a dress as an individual—a person making his own choices and choosing to carry the weight—the “experts” see a demographic, a member of multiple groups, and then parse his appearance for evidence, like a focus group of costume designers. Where I simply do not care if he is gay or straight, progressive or conservative, a Christian or a Jew or a Rosicrucian, if he eats steaks or is a Vegan, where he stands on anthropogenic climate change, or if he votes for Democrats or Republicans, the experts do. Because of choices he is making (which, in my opinion, make him fabulous) the powers that be will craft of him a victim; and force him into a box of their design.
This is a disservice to everyone.
In advanced adulthood I have come to understand that I am hardly unique, and that usually, when I have noticed something, millions upon millions of others have noticed it too. What I am seeing today is pushback against prejudice—not the simple racism and sexism we are constantly harangued about, but the bone-deep assumptions being made by the experts that if one looks like this? They must also, ipso facto, think that.
This conflict plays out every day, and prejudices of all stripes are regularly abused. They don’t hold up in the real world, where people interact with other people. A paradigm in which a third party looks at me, and looks at the young man I mentioned, and decides that because of how we look and what we wear they understand who we are and more, that we hate one another, has no basis. It is a construct with no foundation, swaying in the breeze. Brainless, it is incapable of adapting.
And everything is always changing.
And now, for the time being, changing for the better.
Peace.