Profiling. I’m fairly certain this term is well known, and so let’s proceed as thus. We all do it. We all judge people based on a preconceived notion of who we think they are. These feelings are constructed in various ways, but in todays’ world feelings are mostly influenced by personal experience.
We fear things we do not understand, and fear is often externally exhibited as anger. Since fear is an extremely uncomfortable feeling, our bodies look for ways to express the energy instead of absorb it. Fear is primarily experienced internally, while anger can be experienced externally. This moves the feelings from a passive to an active place, and when we experience big feelings, movement is often the key to self regulation. Fear can be the product of a dysregulated nervous system and a dysregulated nervous system needs stimulation, mostly in the form of movement. Movement with anger is aggression, and that’s when fear becomes dangerous.
Profiling is fear as a tool, but also something we do as an adaptive necessity for evolution. We fear unknown things that we are told to fear, and we fear things we know nothing about. Then we learn quickly how to avoid the things we fear the most. Familiarity is a common comfort. We are most familiar with the things we are raised around and exposed to growing up. Twenty-five is the age that science agrees people reach full maturity. With 35% of people completing a college degree, over half of Americans stop educating themselves at the age of 18 years old. This means about one third of their maturing is done without any formal education or institutional structure. People are left to fend for themselves in a world built around structure and formal institutions. That’s scary. It can be difficult to continue one’s education of anything or to collect varying experiences when there are so many real life, imperative problems and tasks to complete daily in order to just survive.
Being in unknown or new social situations and surroundings can be intimidating and fear generating. Many people automatically go into a protective hibernation mode, recoiling into themselves or any familiarities they can find. This includes familiar friends (not expanding their social circle), preservation snacking to avoid awkward or disjointed conversations, drinking to loosen up and then drinking to engage socially. In any state, closed off or mentally checked out, one impairs their ability to properly absorb new information. Structure is the known, the opposite of the unfamiliar. We wake up at 8am, have a cup of coffee, read for a bit, exercise, or maybe we roll out of bed at 12pm, throw on a pair of pants off the floor, and bolt haphazardly, late to work as usual. Either or any other variation is the structure you build into your life, the constants you grow to rely on. Straying from these can be uncomfortable, and is generally avoided.
Our society is also built around structure. The structure of public, private or at-home education prepares people for work, and work has been tasked with preparing people for life. With 90% of Americans having attended public school, a lot of pressure is perceived to be placed on the local, state and federal government to provide a curriculum that empowers a well-rounded student body. However, with 33.98 million, approximately 10% of the total population, living below the poverty line in the United States, and the top 1% of Americans holding 30.4% of all household wealth in the United States, it is clear that there is a large gap in the basic life resources being distributed amongst the population.
Our brains house a series of neurons that transmit information to other gland cells, muscles and nerve cells. Think of these like roadways. It’s important to lay the groundwork for sturdy roads, as they will be well traversed throughout the course of your life. It’s also important to remember that these grounds, once laid, are extremely difficult to dismantle. Often these roadways are laid during our growth period, which occurs prior to adulthood. This can make adulthood default to maintenance mode. We lazily street sweep, repaint borders, and add new signage as our dictionaries fill up with clearer definitions. This includes defining and categorizing people into easy to identify boxes. This makes it easier to automate behavior in social situations, and removes the pressure of conciousness.
How do we profile those who have and those who have not? What are some of the words you think of in either situation? Are they positive? I didn’t think so. Consider your quickest judgments of people. Take note of them when you are out and about, or when you are in a zoom meeting, or phone conversation. How is your judgement of the person / people you’re interacting with dictating your behavior and your treatment of them? When we start to pay attention to some of our own subconscious biases by paying attention to the words that pop into our heads, they become conscious. They become something we can correct. This is the ‘admitting I have a problem’ stage. Join me, and let’s be better humans together.
Catie Zimmerman 