I heard a woman telling a friend she didn't know much about those running for school board positions in the coming election. In response, the friend said, "Just vote for the women." Such advice rings sort of hollow at a time when DNA research finds, unless DNA shows someone is an intergalactic alien with six arms, less than one percent of a person's DNA makes him or her different from everyone else. We might as well vote for anyone.
Nkechi Okoro Carroll, a black female TV writer and showrunner at the CW network, reminded TV studios they cannot expect one African American to convey the perspective of all blacks. She herself grew up in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast and attended an English boarding school. She knows nothing about the hood.
When I was growing up in Chicago, I asked my mother why there were no black sales clerks at Marshall Fields. She said the store didn't think white customers would buy anything from people who didn't look like them. For a long time, the same thinking, or lack thereof, prevented older, white managers from hiring young, professional women to sell the advertising, copiers, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and everything else they sell today.
The point is, you can't tell a book by its cover and you can't tell those who have something valuable to share by the color of their skin. Stereotypes make it easy to assume we have nothing in common with teachers, characters in books, police officers, politicians, and anyone else who doesn't look like us and we have everything in common with those who look the same as us. Reality suggests more careful discernment pays off when it comes to human relationships.
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