Boxes

It's no secret that we put people in boxes. When you meet people, you ask where they are from, and depending on your priorities, you find out a few details about them, and check them out, really. In this way you can put them in the appropriate box. Oh, you're from x and you went to y school and you do z for a living, and you look like k, so therefore you must be q. Right? I mean, don't we all do this in a sense? I am not saying it's a good thing to do, but it's the way we start when we meet new people. It's the way the Census works. You have to fit yourself into a box. I don't have to tell you that this can be challenging to people from diverse backgrounds, that perhaps not everyone fits neatly in a box. But what about those people who seem to fit? Or can we venture to say that we are all individuals and no one fits neatly into one box?

I had a bit of an "ah-ha" moment the other day. Like, music over my head, oh my goodness, here we go. It was pretty ridiculous, and you may wonder how it had not happened sooner. I have been operating, since I moved to this city, and perhaps even before, with a very fixed set of boxes in my head. Even worse, those boxes are based on very little real information. And I pride myself on being thoughtful and open-minded! I wasn't being thoughtful and open-minded at all. I was being rigid and judgy for no particularly good reason. But I realized WHY I was doing it, which is the important thing!

Because I don't have many friends here, I have been largely experiencing the city through TMH's professional social circle. Let me remind you that I don't feel I have much in common with said circle. I really don't. It is entirely different from the communities I have lived in before, and from my prior experience in life. My life before TMH was almost entirely based on academia, and experienced with others who were also academics or educators. Ever since I finished undergrad, for the most part, I have been working at schools, living in college towns, interacting with students and people who work at universities. To make matters even more extreme, my parents are both academics, too, so I never knew anything different at home. I grew up in my parents' offices on university campuses, meeting their grad students. Also, I grew up very idealistically and went to a super idealistic undergraduate college, where career development basically consisted of grad school prep (I think this is a problem, by the way. Education for education's sake is great, but a dose of practicality might have been nice). The values were always clear. Education is the top priority, and people I knew worked to advance knowledge. Money was not discussed, for the most part, except for the constant "teachers should be paid more." I mean, look at my work now. I work to help brilliant people, mainly in the sciences, though across many different doctoral areas, express their work and their knowledge clearly to be successful in the academic environment here. I had almost zero experience with the business world, or with people who worked outside education or academia, until I met TMH. (Those friends I do have that work outside education or academia I have had for a long time- I somehow think I was seeing them as an exception to the rules. You know, the rules I made up in my head about what's "normal" and "not normal." Goodness. I may even have been seeing TMH as the exception to the rules.)

Before I proceed it is also important for me to mention that TMH grew up in an "education family." The whole family works in education: Mom a teacher, Dad a teacher and then principal, etc. He knew my world, he's essentially from my world, and I would venture to say that my commitment to education is one of the things he likes about me.

I think you may have heard me explain a time or two about my issues getting involved in TMH's social circle. I just didn't understand it. I didn't understand about business school, or about the kind of jobs his friends wanted. I really didn't know anything about consulting, or marketing, or investment banking. My initial reaction to all these fields was disdain. How about that? At first I would go so far as to say I didn't respect them, mostly out of ignorance (and from my high and mighty academic idealism). I was putting these people in boxes out of ignorance, which to me is pretty much the definition of bias, or racism, or something really bad that I never thought I could be guilty of. So much for the open-minded academic. My thoughts were, well, what they do is less important than what I do (let's make rich people richer- where's the value in that?), plus they have too much money, so therefore I don't like them, when what was really happening it that I didn't understand them. I don't know! I don't get it. Why was I looking at the world in such a black and white way, and judging people so extremely based on their professions? How ridiculous, and sad. I literally cried when I figured this out. Why did it take me so long? I can blame no one but myself. Well, that and I actually did meet some pretty extreme people, who I had every reason not to like, and who I then used to generalize to others, and even to develop ideas about this city, when really I just met some extreme individual people who had nothing to do with anyone else! I can tell myself it was a defense mechanism, or some vestige of not being popular and going to private school with spoiled rich kids, but those are lame excuses. The realization came out of a conversation with a new friend, a high school teacher. I realized that she was experiencing the city through the company of teachers, so she was experiencing it in a very different way from me. The city cannot be seen in black and white- there are so many areas in between! I realized that I feel much more at home with other teachers (Normal people! Not like business people, who are not normal people. Seriously, I have these thoughts- as if I like all teachers!) simply because I may have more in common with them, and that I would have very different views on the city if I were experiencing it with a community of people who were more like peers. So, what does this mean? Well, I need to meet more people with whom I have common ground, and part of that means that I need to work to get rid of the judgy boxes in my head. It's a huge relief, really.

Let's look at these boxes from another angle: nationality. Do you think putting people in boxes is any different when you do it by nationality? Oh, you're from China, so you must be x. You're from Mexico, so you must be y. Right? My dissertation is, in part, about views toward non-native English speakers studying in the United States. I teach lots of Chinese students. Lots. Over the course of my career so far, given that I've been working in my specific area since 2001, I have meet and worked closely with a large number of Chinese students. Hundreds, even. As a language professional, 9 times out of 10, before I meet them I can tell them what problems they will have with English. I can predict their attitudes about my class, and perhaps even guess their views on a range of issues. I would think it would be pretty difficult for someone in my position not to develop a set of stereotypes about Chinese students. I try to make myself not do that. I try to judge each new student for who she is, but honestly, it's quite difficult. At least my views are grounded in some reality, though, not ignorance: this is my field, for crying out loud. I know that many Americans only go so far as to see "Asians" and cannot tell (nor do they care) if they are Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc. How can we expect people to be open-minded when we come from a box mentality? We also come from a country that is largely ignorant about other parts of the world, as well as notoriously monolingual. It's a real issue, but one that most people don't care about. One of the goals of a university education is to help people understand diversity, and learn how to work with people from a variety of different backgrounds. What's all this talk about a global economy about, really? I don't think that I have to tell you that natural interaction across groups happens very rarely. Grouping is natural! Using the Chinese example, Americans may criticize them for not speaking English, for not branching out of the Chinese community to make American friends. But which came first? Chinese students perceive that Americans do not want to be friends with them. A Korean student in my study told me she was scared of "white guys." I don't blame her, in a sense. So there you go. What do we do with that?

It's a problem- a super-issue, if you will- that I know I am not going to be able to solve, but I am working on it, on both the personal and professional levels. Stay tuned.