When I was a kid, the type of things I’d be asked (particularly at my all-white, limited diversity public school) would usually range somewhere from “Are you Chinese?” to “Are you good at math?” (spoiler alert: I’m not either). Assumptions make themselves aware to us in the way other people interact with us, whether at first meeting or throughout our course of knowing them, and in our own reactions to others; if we come across a man with a briefcase and blazer, we may believe he’s of wealth and successful, the way we might presume someone with dirty clothes and a shopping cart full of junk to be poor and homeless, as per the situations we discussed in class today. No matter if we cancel whatever thought we had immediately after thinking it, or never do: we still think them either way.
But these types of assumptions can often ring much more harmful; for those like the kids Gerardo Lopez nurtured through his gang intervention program, assumptions made at face value could lead to anywhere from rejected job interviews to physical violence, depending on the situation and magnitude of the supposition. This is not to discount any of the “smaller scale” assumptions: if various people make the same opinions of you for your entire life, it can build up to the point that it’s deleterious. But there are direct consequences to assumptions made of dire situations, and for someone like any of the people we heard and talked about, lives can be altered in significant ways from assumptions made by others, whether those alterations be external or internal.
annie 