The Dirty Face

“I don't believe in stereotypes, I prefer to hate people on a more personal basis. The measure of a truly great man is the courtesy with which he treats lesser men. An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind.” - Mahatma Gandhi

There I sat, tucked under my mom’s arm, resting on her hip, little legs flopping loosely as she carried me through the doors of a retail chain to see my dad, hard at work. We wandered the aisles looking for the top of his head, which tended to stick out of crowds. I spotted him and pointed. His moustache was steady as he gave some instruction to a woman stocking shelves. We walked up and he pulled me from my mom’s arms and threw me into the air. “Bobby, this is Scottie. Scottie, Bobby.” He introduced me to the woman and I buried my head in his shoulder. “What do you say? Tell her hello,” he said, as Scottie fought to get a look at my face. I peered over from the corner of my shy eyes and asked, “Why do you have dirt on your face?”

My mom and dad both gasped, offering their apologies to Scottie while demanding one from me. Scottie just laughed and poked at my side, making me laugh. “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t have dirt on my face. This is just how I look, how I was born.”

It was my first and most important life lesson; when every child at some point realizes that everyone is not like mommy and daddy, in fact, most people are quite different from mommy and daddy. It’s at this crucial point in a child’s life when mommy and daddy, or mommy and mommy, or step-daddy and Uncle Bruce – or whoever – must do the right thing. We must teach children to confront and discuss our differences, not to treat them as dirty secrets or creeping shadows.

But we all know that. Or it stands that we should by now. Either way, it cannot prevent stereotyping. Whether you’re Bo, the 62-year-old high school janitor from Dixie, Mississippi, or Meghan, the 33-year-old college professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts, you’ve been stereotype’s victim and perpetrator.

The question isn’t whether or not we should stereotype. Of course we shouldn’t. But first impressions and across-the-room judgments are hardly preventable. The question is how we can prevent it from running our lives and dictating our potential relationships.

The more people I meet and get to know, the more I realize how different we all really are, and that stereotypes rarely hold any truth.

The best stay-at-home mom I know is a dad. The most over-weight person I know is a vegetarian. My wife’s hairstylist is a man, and he is not gay. John Kennedy, FDR, Thomas Jefferson, Michael Jordan – written into our culture on stamps and currency and billboards as the stereotypical American heroes – all of them had mistresses. The straight family-man conservative stereotype has taken a few unnecessary trips to the restroom. The rational, scientific astronaut stereotype suffocated during a long car ride. The inferior-athleticism-of-women stereotype was torn off and kicked aside long ago.

Once differences are discovered, we tend to file them away into neatly labeled drawers for convenient retrieval. We need those notes to get through the day. But they’re inaccurate at best. The drawers cannot possibly hold the whole range of human possibilities. There are just too many options, too many people with their own experiences, making their own choices, who can’t live within such a confined set of rules and expectations. We all break stereotypes every day. We can’t help it.