Too often I get caught up in the hype and simplicity of stereotypes. Oh, he’s a football player? Cocky. Always in the library? Nerd. Vacations to the Bahamas every year? Spoiled and filthy rich. Uses Tinder to meet girls? Creepy. But you know what? It’s all completely ridiculous. As if you could actually know all you need to know about someone based on one thing about them. It’s so easy to judge someone, but so much harder to try to level yourself and see things from their perspective. And it's even harder still to get to know them. But it’s a worthwhile exertion, and it’s one that I am resolving to do more in the new year. Let’s leave labels in 2015, for God’s sake.
I never liked it when people would make assumptions about me just because I did all my homework or stayed home on a Friday night. I was never the kind you invited to crazy parties or the kind you smoke pot with behind the house or the kind to wear a skimpy outfit to school, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t a person worth knowing or that I didn’t like to have fun. It just meant that maybe I had fun doing all different kinds of things.
And then when you leave high school, you think maybe it will end: the stereotypes, judgement, and cliques. But it doesn’t, does it? In college, it just becomes based on the dorm you live in, the major you choose, the places you go out at night, the music you listen to, and so on. Except now it’s even easier to judge people than it was in high school because you’re literally surrounded by them 24/7. What’s even worse is that so many people won’t even go out of their way to meet people from all sorts of walks of life because instead they just find their group and stick with them, even in college. Some say that in college you’re finally free, but your mind certainly isn’t.
And it’s no different in the real world. Then the stereotypes just get nastier, with race, gender, and class forming the bulk of it. And bullies, the kind you thought you left behind in kindergarten, are around every corner.
But it’s so ridiculous. All of it. Just listen to yourself. Mocking people you don’t know for things you’ll never understand when that very type of behavior would infuriate you if it was directed at yourself. I’m certainly no better either, but I want to be. If not for the sake of my own moral conscience than at least so I can encourage others to try to stereotype less and chat with people a little more.
What I’ve learned is that it’s as simple as this: Your college major does not define you. Neither does your college, eye color, favorite pair of pants, nor heritage. It’s irrelevant; they're just pieces of a whole. It’s the way you treat people that matters—the light you choose to bring into the world or the resentment you let darken you from the inside out. Stereotypes feed hate and resentment, and they bring us down. If we all spent a little more time and energy trying to understand one another rather than cutting people down with narrow-minded thinking, we could make good on our promise for a “new year, new me” and really make this year count.
