Once upon a time, there was a king, a benevolent king. He strived for the prosperity of his people, and sacrificed many an opportunity for personal gain, silently and without demanding credit. But in one exceptionally bad year of flood and famines, he was forced to raise taxes to finance a necessary war with a neighbouring kingdom.
Maybe this was excusable for a man of his track record. But there was one little problem– his ancestors had been ruthless rulers for centuries, callous to their subjects’ needs. And this one inadvertent decision helped brand him as the same – a brutal dictator – and spurred a revolution that ended with his head at the guillotine.
A good man, victim of nothing but a stereotype.
I have always heard about the power of stereotypes, but being a able bodied mentally capable, heterosexual, man, I have experienced little myself. Recently, however, something changed when I left my razor behind on a trip and ended up with stubble half-an-inch long.
Looking at the mirror, I realized to my delight that facial hair suited me better than ever before and kept my new look going despite my wife making acerbic remarks.
Little did I know this was going to teach me a valuable life lesson!
The first instance that struck me was when some folks at home and work began asking if I was going to go pray the Taraweeh, a good deed I had never done in my life. When I asked why this was suddenly a relevant question, they claimed they saw my ‘new look’ as a sign of Ramadan-induced piety!
Some interpretations were less innocent. Amidst the more political of my compatriots, it quickly became a hypothesis that if AL’s days were numbered and Jamaat was likely to be back in power with the BNP, maybe I was trying to hide my largely agnostic religious views behind a cover of facial vegetation. Needless to say, I played along gleefully.
Then one day, I was on my way to work when my rickshaw was suddenly stopped at a police checkpoint. A couple of non-bearded policemen came over and began asking me who I was, what office I worked for and why I was apparently so late for work. They asked me to open my bag. I was fascinated to observe as they unpacked every single compartment, felt around for hidden ones, and whispered to each other while they did so. Every electronic gadget (of which there were many) became an object of added suspicion. The icing on the cake was some homeopathic medication – they opened the packaging and when they discovered a white powdery substance inside some capsules, one of them ran to their bosses while the other held on to the rickshaw as if I were going to fly away with it. I heard the first guy gasping excitedly, “Boss, paisi…heroine!”
Of course it was their mistake and they duly apologized and let me go. But I pondered over how they had transitioned between two facial-hair-related stereotypes even without thinking about it. When they first stopped me, it was probably because of the ongoing hoopla about the Hefazat and Shibir. Perhaps they reasoned they were looking for a bomb, or something that resembled a component, in my bag fat with gadgets.
When they found the white substance however, it immediately reshaped their mental model of who I was – this time an addict with stooped shoulders and dark sunken eyes. Somewhat of an antithesis to the original stereotype but equally impossible to resist!
I must confess I myself am not immune to these stereotypes. Many a time, I have myself made sweeping generalizations and judgments about people’s worldviews, their behavior, their preferences and their predilections, simply based on their physical appearance and attire.
But there is nothing innocent about relying on stereotypes. Our mental models shape how we interact with those around us. And with such stereotypes clouding our mind, it is impossible to take everything and everyone for who they are, instead of how we imagine they are. Our mental stereotypes determine our approach, and perhaps we force them (those being stereotyped) to adapt and internalize certain behaviors to fit our mental models and to feel a sense of belonging to the group that resembles them.
And so back to the good king. He may have been forced to punish and execute some of the revolutionaries in his quest to survive, something which he might otherwise have never done had he not been branded a dictator. A chilling reminder that it’s not just people who generate stereotypes. Maybe sometimes stereotypes determine who we become.