By Baraah Aldaw
People say don’t judge a book by its cover. Often times, we become those covers that are judged, stereotyped and even ridiculed before getting to the actual pages of the proverbial book.
Or in our case, the inner dimensions of what makes us who we are. We become the victims of stereotype and judgmental of our physical appearance, our attire, or even what is heard about our race and country of origin.
Sometimes, we ourselves become the perpetrators of such prejudice.
Why do we judge people to begin with? Some may say that judging others makes them feel better about themselves, but the truth is, it makes you feel shallow and superficial.
Ask yourselves this question; have you ever judged a person before, or been in a situation whereby you were the victim? The answer would most probably be a ‘yes’.
How can we judge a person without knowing who they are? We tend to make up opinions about a person and do not give him or her the chance that he or she deserves. These unfounded assumptions about others destroy the basis for mutual respect and cooperation.
Everybody deserves a fair chance because we were born to be real and not to be perfect.
In judging people, we automatically jump to conclusion about them. We mainly judge people because when we see someone, our brain automatically takes a picture of them and decides whether they are trustworthy or not.
However, we may also judge people because of jealousy, when we see someone we automatically jump to conclusions about them perhaps because they are not good enough and they do not have anything in common with us.
We may not realise it but when we hear someone saying something judgmental, such as “Oh, they are not cool enough to hang out with,” or “No, I do not like them because they look funny”, we should try to refrain from letting these potentially dangerous thoughts colour our perception and downgrade ourselves to such levels.
Just because someone looks or seems different, this is by no means a prerequisite to jump to negative conclusion.
Judging others can actually have adverse effects, causing people to become sick, depressed and can even lead them to suicide. By saying things like “you are fat,” or “nobody likes you,” this can cause people to look down on themselves and feel worthless. Moreover, it can also lead to depression and social isolation.
Before we come down too hard on being judgmental let us level the playing field and acknowledge the fact that we all do it, we all make those initial judgment cause about others. In a moment’s time we determine whether or not we would like to pursue our friendship with someone or if our time will be better spent elsewhere, sometimes our assumptions are correct and at other times we completely miss the mark.
If you can take, for example, the prostitute on the street corner, when we see her we make initial assessment of her, a judgment call about her that she is worthless and she is not worth our time.
Thus, so quickly do we forget that she is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister or better yet someone’s mother, and because we fail to see the world through her eyes we globe in our own self rightness and we say I would never do anything like that, how dare she, how could she.
That prostitute will be on a street corner with her high heels on, a mini skirt and the bright red lipstick. May be she has been up all night, this is not her first trip to the strip corner. What we do not see are the four children that she has at home. The four children whose cry drove her to the street corner. The four children whose hunger and pain made her sell her body. Even if selling her body the only thing that she could afford was a loaf of bread and water.
That prostitute that many people look down upon was my friend’s mother. It was my friend and her sisters whose cry that lead their mother to the corner.
This proves the point that in our human experience we are all so much more that meets the eye and the only way to get to that inner person is to dig deeper to have conversations, to refuse to make judgment about people, to refuse to make those snap judgments when we interact with our classmates when they come to class.
My friend was a smelly young girl who showed up to class with dirty clothes on. It is not because she enjoyed being dirty or she enjoyed the smell of her own musk but because she did not have running water in her home. She did not have the utilities or the things necessary to wash her clothes.
Though she went to school wearing the best uniform that she could, she went to school combing her hair the best she knows how, yet she was still the one everyone in the classroom determined she was worthless.
Therefore, we should challenge every thought that we think, the first initial assessment that we think about anyone because we never know how they got into that situation. When we challenge our thoughts and challenge our prejudices towards others we can really make this human experience better.
There is only one thing that makes our human experience better, which is compassion. The only way to get to compassion is to move beyond self and move beyond what we see and have heart-felt conversations and discourses with others.
It is in that conversation and discourse that we identify our own vulnerabilities.
Why are people so quick to judge? We all are humans we all make mistakes, so why blame them or judge them for their mistakes, the trials and the hardships they face. We have no idea of what they went through, so just do the simple human act of talking to them.
Get to know them. Embrace cultural differences and diversity. Let’s not judge them for who they are because that is them, just like how you and I are who we are.***