Amazing the categories we place on each other

T.D. Brown
Published: May 15, 2008

A few weeks ago I met up with some Army recruiters to talk to college students about opportunities in the military. While waiting for the students, we talked amongst ourselves and it came up that I was married to another local soldier. When I mentioned my husband’s name, one of the soldiers cocked her head to the side, peered intently at me with surprise, and said, “huh.” This gesture was familiar to me. I’ve been married three and a half years and every so often, my husband and I run into an old friend or co-worker of his who can’t believe that he married a black woman.

Before we got together, my husband dated a white woman for a little over a year. This was years before we even met, and he had two or three girlfriends after her. But actually, that’s neither here nor there, because people who meet him for the first time assume that his wife is white.

I thought he would have married a white woman. How am I supposed to react to that? I could be snide and say, I am white, I just have one mother of a tan. But is the comment meant as an insult or a compliment? To him or to me? Maybe it is just a narrow-minded observation that people should keep to themselves.

It is so amazing to me — the categories we place each other in, based on appearances and mannerisms. It is my understanding that people think a certain kind of black person dates a white person – a middle-class, mild-mannered, well-educated, suburban-raised, proper-speaking black person who undoubtedly listens to all kinds of music. This is a common stereotype of the black/white relationship, but one can’t help wonder if the assumptions don’t hold a nugget of truth. For sure, I can think of quite a few people who fit this mold, but of course I can think of a few who don’t, my husband being one of them.

My husband is a gangster. Maybe not your shoot ‘em up gangster, but one whose answer to every problem is to beat someone up. Somebody tailgates my husband on the highway? Let the guy pass and then ram his car. A person doesn’t hold the door open when he’s right behind them? Punch him in the back of the head. Somebody says “good morning”? Knock him out. And you wouldn’t exactly call his former neighborhood the suburbs.

The assumptions that people make about one another blow my mind. They think they know your type and something about your character or the way you carry yourself makes people think they know you well enough to write your life story. I knew a white guy who went to shake a black guy’s hand using his left hand. The black guy was insulted: where he was raised a left-handed hand shake was disrespectful. He thought the white guy was being rude, and wrote him off as a jerk, when in reality, the guy had nerve damage in his right hand and it was hard for him to grasp or grip anything.

Why do we do pigeonhole people? Is it to make ourselves more comfortable with each other once we’ve attached a label? Is it because we either don’t care or are afraid to get to know someone better? I once had someone describe my look as Afro-centric. What does Afro-centric even mean in that context? Wearing my hair natural and nappy makes me a card carrying denouncer of Europeanism?

The bottom line is that it is one thing to have a belief and another to act on it. I guess it’s not so much that people think he would have married a white woman as the fact that they feel the need to say it out loud. For example, there are no consequences for thinking your mate looks fat in a particular pair of jeans. But if you say it, then you must literally roll with the punches.

I am not saying that I have never made assumptions about people based on the way they look or act, but what I often do (and I am not making this up) is ridicule myself out loud for thinking that way. I’ll say something like, that woman could have just given birth to triplets, that’s why she’s a tad on the large side. When trying to broaden your limited line of thinking, it helps me when you hear how foolish you sound.

T.D. Brown is VCU graduate and a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, where she is a public affairs NCO in the communications office.