On Representativeness

This blog post contains personal musings on race, racism, equity, and inclusion prompted by my own thinking and continual education and especially How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi. This is written with the primary purpose of working through my own thoughts and learnings, but if it's helpful to you in some way, all the better!

I was riding on a local bike path the other day, listening to How to Be an Antiracist and suddenly the concept of representativeness was illuminated in sharp relief. 

I'm a big fan of "friendly trails" and as I ride my bike on our local paths, I try to say hi or wave to everybody I pass. Of course, there are times I'm distracted or feeling a little fussy or concentrating on something else, and I miss returning a wave or smiling at a fellow trail user. Now, of course, I know this is not indicative of my overall friendliness as a person - I'm a good person who just happened to miss that wave. But other people? Heavens, if they don't smile back or wish me a "good morning" I quickly assume that they are unfriendly trail users and probably should be banned from all multi-use paths ;)

And this got me thinking hard about race and representativeness. And I came to the following conclusions (all obvious and also based in known psychological theories, but they hit me on a personal level in a new way):

1. I am predisposed to assume the best about my own intentions or people with which I have an affinity. For example, as a skier I may assume that line-cutting by a fellow skier was an accident or oversight, while line-cutting by a snowboarder is clearly the action of a thoughtless punk.
2. The more unfamiliar I feel with a group, the more likely I am to view their individual behaviors as representative of that group. For example, if I don't know many Indians, I'm more likely to assume that the choices of the first few Indians I meet are representative of all people from India.
3. But this is dumb. The actions of an individual do not represent the behaviors of a group. They represent the behaviors of that individual at that moment.

These are useful insights on their own, but this chain of "logic" becomes more difficult and potentially when applied to race. The concept of "representing" one's race (or any group) is crazy-pants, yet it's one we use and hear commonly. 

There simply is no such thing as racial behavior. There's no such thing as "black behavior." There are personal behaviors. And there can be shared culture within races (and plenty of shared culture that has nothing to do with racial constructs) and some in a shared culture can share behaviors, but that is many steps away from a racial behavior. Behavior simply cannot and should not be representative of race. Assuming otherwise is just as silly (and far more potentially dangerous) as me assuming that the person who didn't wave to me on the bike path is unfriendly because they're wearing the same color helmet as the last person who didn't wave to me on the bike path.

Individual behavior does not represent race. Individual behavior represents individuals.