The Stranger as a Construct of Biases - Essay Example

Section/# The Stranger as a Construct of Biases: Understanding Sara Ahmed’s Piece Through the Lens the Use of Stereotypes, Racism, Ageism, Sexism, and other Preconceptions A strange is not just someone we do not know – it is oftentimes a “type” that we have categorized all too well and have perhaps “known” before....as such we work to keep this “Type” at arms length – again a mere construct of our minds as we make inference and draw conclusions based on superficial knowledge immediately gleaned by the 5 senses at a mere millisecond’s glance. It is of particular interest that Ahmed notes the varying levels of interactions between “known and unknown” as they relate to the stranger. Whereas one can easily recognize their neighbor as someone that fits invariably into their everyday life, the individual by means of stereotyping/judgment can equally judge an “unknown” individual/stranger as a type of individual that they have categorized as a certain type to be avoided. Ahmed notes in her opening paragraph concerning the initial thoughts that go through the mind of the perceiver when faced with a stranger: “I know you but I don’t want to know you quote” (Ahmed, 21). “The stranger then is not simply the one we have not encountered – but the one we have encountered and who we have already faced (Ahmed, 21) Thus the term stranger begins to lose a great deal of its conventional meaning and begins to have a second life as a definition of a way in which humans work to compartmentalize their lives. As such, Ahmed further relates that “strangers” are those individuals that do not fit into the compartmentalized realities that we construct around us; thus, since they do not fit, we shun and avoid them and provide them with an “alien” name to denote the fact that they do not belong to our given construct. For purposes of this analysis, this author has selected the area in and around the first apartment I resided while a university student. Due to the fact that the apartment building was primarily housing for college students, the understanding of what was “other” and what was a “stranger” as defined by Ahmed was quite the simple task. In this way, a type of ageism was applied to those that did not fit in and around the area. Oftentimes, what we would deem “unsavory” people would frequent the area in and around the apartment buildings in an attempt to panhandle the youths due to the fact that they invariably found their naivety an easy target to generate money. Understandably, the student-friendly housing offered student-friendly pricing and was therefore located directly in between what could be considered a nice part of town and a very economically depressed part of town. In much the same way, Ahmed notes: “To recognize means to know again, to acknowledge and to admit. How do we know the stranger again? The recognisability of strangers is determinate in the social demarcation of spaces of belonging: the stranger is ‘known again’ as something that has already contaminated such spaces as a threat to both property and person” (Ahmed, 22). It is difficult to say if this human classification of “other” is a net good or a net evil due to the fact that in many ways it works as a self defense mechanism to keep us safe from “perceived” harm; however, at the same time, it puts our ingrained biases with relation to age, gender, spatialism, and racism to the forefront of our judgment. This is an interesting dichotomy not only because it forces young students to face the realities of those less fortunate and develop their own defense mechanisms with respect to how they chose to interact with this foreign and unfamiliar subculture; but in that all of this was taking place during the formative college years. This dichotomy is of extreme interest due to the fact that these formative years are supposed to be very years in which young people are supposed to be the most open minded and suppliant to differing lifestyles as well as approaching new topics with an open mind. However, the realities of contextualization, site understanding, stereotyping and all of the other psychological processes that are undertaken in order to categorize individuals in this manner only serves to reinforce many negative aspects of how the human mind places individuals in conveniently understood (yet oftentimes faulty) categorizations. Another point that bears discussion is how Ahmed’s specific contextual understanding is based on where the perceiving individual is at any given time. Although the example of the apartment building frequently used by young college students serves as an example of a construct around which understandings of belong and non-belonging, ageism, racism, or having a particular preference with regards to one socio-economic status over another begins to become manifest. However, the site alone is an example of a complete data set as the preconceived notions of what defines “other” is also highly dependent upon the life-experience and biases of the individual as he/she exists within any given context. For instance, although preconceived notions of belonging as a definition of space can easily exist around certain place holdings and sites, it would be an untrue and biased statement to say that all of these preconceived biases of what constitutes “other” and “stranger” melt away and are entirely dependent upon the sites that the perceiver is engaged with. The take away from this assessment and understanding is that our judgment mechanisms are employed to make rapid split-second decisions with relation to many unsavory factors that oftentimes individuals never want to consider as the analysis of these judgments would necessarily lend the individual to understand that he/she is an: ageist, sexist, racist, or a discriminator of some other variety. In effect, the “stranger” recognition mechanisms that humans employ revert back to the most primitive understanding of safety, familiarity, and definitions of “other”. As such, the understanding of how we categorize and classify the stranger and those that do not comfortably fit into both the sites and understandings of our world as we perceive it help to lend a valuable understanding on the preconceived notions that we ensconce ourselves in on a daily basis. However, the fact of the matter is that even Ahmed relates that “sites” alone are not adequate to understand how humans go about categorizing and understanding the world in which they interact. As she notes, sites alone are not sufficient for inference/bias to be drawn with relation to understanding and categorizing individuals in a rapid way. Ahmed relates the story of how police officers oftentimes use associations to determine the relationships, links, and likelihood that certain individuals are involved in actions based upon the actions of their compatriots. Ahmed states of these varying levels of context in which individuals stratify their understandings of their surroundings, “Rather, inter-subjective encounters in public life continually reinterpellate subjects into differentiated economies of names and signs, where they are assigned different value in social spaces. Noticeably, the use of the narrative of the police hailing associates the constitution of subjects with their subjection to a discourse of criminality, which defines the one who is hailed as a threat to property” (Ahmed, 24). In this way, the varying levels to which humans ascribe stereotypes and value judgments upon one another based on the relationships that a given individual keeps explains the ways in which nearly every imaginable action, relationship, setting, class, race, socio-economic status, and a variety of other tools are employed in order to categorize a “stranger”. In this way, it is possible to see the host of ways in which value judgments that individuals perform a daily basis help to define and categorize the world around us. This is not only done for purposes of fear/safety but to determine empathy levels, concern, attention that should be paid, and appropriate response levels to a host of stimuli. In this way, Ahmed’s piece helps to exemplify a part of humanity that many would rather leave unspoken as it shows a politically incorrect side of humanity that acknowledges many of the less than desirable actions we perform on a daily and hourly basis as part of our common interactions. Works Cited Ahmed, Sarah. “Recognizing Strangers”. Critical encounters with texts : finding a place to stand. Boston: Pearson Custom Pub, 2005. Read More