Transitioning

Last week I moved over 1,000 miles in preparation for attending a doctoral program in a few weeks. I have orientations and meetings beginning next week, so I wanted some time to settle before then. So far so good, but being away from home, family, and friends is difficult. At the same time, it's also very exciting to enter a new stage in my life and to see where it's going to take me.

To kickstart this new stage in my life, I attended a workshop on campus that discussed how differing perspectives impact the classroom and/or the workplace (I had free time and it sounded interesting, so I figured why not?). I consider myself to be fairly open to hearing out different perspectives already, but it was still a great workshop. A few points that resonated with me were the issue of stereotyping and how my family, friends, school, and the media communicate particular perspectives, ideals, etc.

The discussion on stereotypes was brought forth from this TEDTalk that discusses "the single story." Chimamanda Adichie does an excellent job explaining that each person's perspective is shaped by their own experiences, which are often furthered by the media in particular, and that someone in America may have a particular perspective of what life is like in Africa that may not be true for many (or any) people. This really got me thinking about how people judge others and put them into a particular "box" based upon physical appearances. Whether it be weight, height, hair color, body modifications, clothing or something else entirely we make note of physical attributes and use it as a way to "figure out" a person. I'm not sure this can really be avoided, except in the sense that we don't allow these perceptions to result in negative or offensive behaviors, but all of these things only tell a "single story" of that person and we cannot allow that to be the only story we learn about them.

Family, friends, school, and media can perpetuate these stereotypes, perspectives, ideals, etc. of people and also of places. As a part of the workshop we did an activity where we had to identify how true or false particular messages (like poor people are lazy) were sent to us in practice (not what was spoken) through those four channels. I never really stopped to think about that before, so it interesting to see what I came up with. It was also interesting to note particular trends among all of the participants of the workshop. We basically concluded that the media in the U.S. sucks and doesn't send the best messages.

The takeaway from both of these points is that "single stories" are all around us, and it's our responsibility to understand that that is in fact the case. It is also our responsibility to be open to differing perspectives in order to better understand where other people are coming from. How can we ever hope to make change if we don't understand what the other perspectives are?