How are you thinking?

            A stranger gets on the bus and we can immediately notice several things about them. Are they male/female, black/white/Asian/Latino, short/tall, skinny/fat, and the list goes on and on.  We soak in visual cues and without hesitation make reference to where we have seen that appearance or behavior before.  Then our mind is thinking about everything associated with that memory or idea that is in our head.  It’s been maybe three whole seconds and we have already created an image of this person in our head of what they may or may not be outside of what we can observe.

            While I was growing up I also considered myself to be tolerant and never liked to think of people as black or white, that was just the way there are and it made no difference to me.  I had been in racial diverse school up until 8^th grade.  I thought I had seen it all.  Then I moved to a small town with its population being predominately white.  I can remember thinking of the kids that drove big four wheel drive trucks to school as “hicks” or farmers that wore nothing but flannels and wranglers and listened to country music 24/7. Truth is, some did, but not all of them.

            After our diversity event last Wednesday I have been thinking about how I think.  As much as I might hate to admit it, I often assume things about people just by looking at them.  I love to over analyse what people are wearing, what kind of phone they have, if they say “please and thank you”, and I think about how that could contribute to their personality.

 One of the kids that lives next door to me go is 17 year old African American that goes to high school here in Ames.  The first time I saw him hanging around outside first thought was “what this strange person is doing outside my apartment.”  I’d be lying if I didn’t think about the stereotypes associated with black males. What was important was what I did with that thought, I put it to the back of my mind and made the conscious decision to assume the best.  As it turns out he’s a good kid that likes to play football and works at the McDonalds just down the block.

            I believe that as a human being it is critical that we constantly challenge our thoughts and impressions that we put onto others every single day.  But as a peer mentor it is absolutely essential that we have a clear understanding of diversity in our classroom and how we think.  We have the ability to peel back the layers of what we think we know about people and we can attempt to understand who they are.  We should challenge ourselves every day to get to know our mentees and co-mentors so that the only assumptions we can make are the ones we have experienced.

~Easten