Looking In A Mirror (or, Realizing you aren't as great as you think you are)

Last week, two of my second graders called me over and asked a question. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something fairly straightforward most likely, something that I would know the answer to, or could at least find out for them if I didn’t.

“Miss Mary Margaret, I wouldn’t have been allowed in restaurants a long time ago, right? Because I’m brown?”

Her friend sitting across the table chimed in. “Me, too!”

“No,” she said firmly. “You have light skin.”

“But I’m still brown,” the other girl responded.

I looked at this little girl with her slightly tanned skin and the other with her skin like dark caramel and I had no idea what to say. Because honestly, I didn’t know the answer. Would either of them have been allowed into a ‘white’ restaurant, one, both? When we learned about segregation in school, we learned about black and white. For me, this was African Americans and Caucasians. I never considered how segregation would have affected other ethnicities, and when I looked at these two girls staring up at me expectantly, I realized that I probably couldn’t answer to their satisfaction regardless. Because when I looked at them, I couldn’t understand the strong distinction they were making between their skin colors. To my eyes, their skin, in combination with their other distinguishing features, meant they were Latina.

Our class played a game where the students had to write down five words to describe themselves. The teacher would then read out the list and the students would have to guess who the person was that had written the list. ‘Light-skinned,’ ‘brown,’ and ‘tan’ appeared multiple times and as the process of elimination occurred, I was utterly lost to the reasoning of ‘so-and-so isn’t brown’ and ‘this person is light skinned.’

The kids’ idea of light and dark-skinned is so totally removed from my own that it makes me realize how completely arbitrary skin color actually is, and how arbitrary my perception of it is. What I see as tan, they might see as light, and what I see as light, they might see as brown. We have grown up in different communities with different ways of describing skin color and different definitions of what those colors are. And it makes me understand deeper an unfortunate truth that I would prefer not to acknowledge.

I’ve been taught to stereotype.

I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I see a person and I slot them into a space in my mind filled with bits and pieces of preconceived notions and biases, thinking myself above such things even as I go through the process again and again. In psychology, it is called a schema. And it actually has a purpose in our day-to-day lives, helping us to organize information and relationships in a rapidly changing environment so that we don’t constantly spend time relearning the same things over and over again. We all do it, and there is no reason to be ashamed of that.

But I am ashamed that I accept the information developed by my schema so readily. I’m ashamed that I feel a moment of shock every time I realize that one of the light-skinned students at the school has a Hispanic last name, or that they speak fluent Spanish. And I’m ashamed that I feel more solidarity with the people who look more like me than the people who don’t.

There are little prejudices I am finding in myself everyday. Little things that shape how I react to people, what I think about them, and, the most reproachable, how I think about myself in relation to them.

I never feel guiltier than when I realize I’ve applied these schemas and stereotypes to the kids I’m meeting at school. There is no way to become more aware of how ridiculous racial and ethnic stereotypes can be than to look at an eight-year old during recess and see them interacting with their peers, completely unaware that their last name has already branded them as someone to be wary of. Or maybe they are aware – which, honestly, is far, far worse.

But if I had never come to this place, if I had never gone to Kenya, I don’t know that I would ever have realized how strong the inclination to stereotype is for me, or how much it shapes my interactions with strangers. It may be that I hide it fairly well, but the fact that it happens at all, and that it can influence my behavior in a negative way, is a problem that I need to address.

Addressing my prejudices means facing them – taking a long hard look at my initial thoughts when I see new people and asking myself whether those thoughts and feelings are justified.

I think we all have a duty to challenge ourselves to be better than we are. However, we can’t challenge ourselves unless we know ourselves, and we can’t know ourselves unless we analyze why we act the way we act and think the way we think. We often become comfortable in ourselves, not because we accept who we are, but because we don’t make the effort to see ourselves clearly. We trust that we are already the best version of ourselves and we expect the world to see us as we perceive ourselves to be.

But they won’t. Because often, we aren't.

Our thoughts can influence our actions, especially thoughts that we don’t even question. Actions of prejudice grow from the seeds of our thoughts and perceptions. I hope we all try to grow something beautiful, rather than something hateful.

My two little girls forgot their question a few minutes later and I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer for them. But I found a question for myself and it is one that I will have to answer again and again, each day anew.

“How did I look at others today? With love or with prejudice?”