Aren’t we all responsible?

“He put on weight this summer, looks like.”

A neighbour’s comment to the mother of a ten year old.

“What happened, she used to be very fair…”

Is that an innocent concern of a visiting relative?

“Your boy has always been an achiever. You must be so proud of him,” a father says to his friend, oblivious of his own son paying attention.

“This colour doesn’t suit your skin tone. Pick something else”.

“You will look fat in these stripes.”

“Being a girl, she too…” “Boys can’t be so…”

“We are looking for a fair, tall, well-educated bride for our son…”

You could keep adding to this list. How much we all stereotype beauty, health, intelligence, performance, success, everything. How easily do we, often unconsciously, slot people into categories and margin out those that don’t fit the bill?! It may not always be our intention, but don’t we still do the damage? You have met your friends after a long while. Seeing their son next to them, you say, “Haven’t seen him at all, what, is he in seventh grade now?”

The parent sheepishly says ” No, he is in tenth grade.”

You have already done the damage, but continue to add, “Oh my God, he looks so small for his age!”

There you go, thank you. The boy would want to run to the edge of the earth where there are no human beings. Why can’t we stop ourselves from making these silly, seemingly innocuous but indeed obnoxious, useless, damaging remarks and comments? You could just have asked, “Which grade are you in, son?” instead, and could say a motivating word if possible and leave. Why this urge to say something and leave a bad taste? Is it in our culture to grab the privilege of ‘commenting’?

These are some of the huge biases that we hold very deeply in our minds, formed over the years through our environment and conditioning. We have to be conscious of the damage we cause without thinking. Developing a healthy mindset will help us broaden our horizons and our children to grow in an open and un-prejudiced society.

This topic has much larger connotations for which agitations are going on in different parts of the world. Time we check around and see how we are contributing to this malicious phenomenon, consciously or unconsciously!