Why do we judge by the color of skin ?

Why do we treat people according to where they are from ?

Why do we assume a whole country of people we don’t know are all the same while we fight everyday in our own society to be unique?

I began to dwell on these questions a couple of weeks ago, it was mind boggling. How could we live in a society where people are put into categories even before they have a chance to introduce themselves.

Even before starting this blog, i was interested in bringing attention and awareness to the fact that consciously or subconsciously, we as humans have been trained to judge people. My interest for this topic started after i watched a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie talks about the danger of a single story. The single story she refers to is the one sided prospective of a country we all have. We don’t realize the that we are really just grouping everyone in one country to be one person, with the personality and characteristics of one person in an entire country.

At the beginning of her speech, Adichie mentions her passion for books, and her early career as a writer. She talks about how she use to depict the characters in her books, just the way she had read them to be in the books she had read. Adichie’s characters were all white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather even though she had personally never experienced either of those. She goes on reason why she would do that,

” What this demonstrates, i think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particulate as children.”

She then does goes ahead to talk about how eventually she found African books, where she could relate more to. she also had only then realized that girls like her could exist in books as well.

” The unintended consequence was that i did not know that people like me could exist in literature… the discovery of African American writers did for me was this: it saved me from having a single story of what books are “.

As Adichie spoke, i realized that even though i have had the opportunity to travel and see the world, there are times i subconsciously stereotype people every day. We all do in the most simple ways, yet we don’t realize. Our lives are composed of many different stories, compiling them all and making them one single story and assuming everyone in a country has the same story would not accurately describe the unique individuals in society.

There are many individuals like Adichie. Many influential people in our lives have overcome the stereotypes placed on them.Our president, Barak Obama, became the first African American individual to step into the office. i remember that during the day of Obama’s inaugural speech, my teacher told us that, that day was a day worth going into history books. That day demonstrated that equality between cultures in America were mending.

There are people everywhere that we don’t realize, but defy the stereotypes that were placed on them even before they were born. We all face judgment every day, but its up to us to decide on the way we want to act towards it. Through experience i have learned that people around me have some times exceeded  the expectations i have for them, subconsciously or consciously i categorized individuals into categories with different amounts of will power, when in reality, it all depends in the moment waiting ahead. We could either live in a world where everyone is judged by the color of their skin and the country they come from, or defy the laws of stereotype.