Mother in her forties or fifties, Black, middle class. Spanish man in his eighties who reminds me of my grandpa. Heterosexual white male with a job on Wall Street. Queer college student, female, might be Latina, might be white.
Some might call “people-watching” the ordinary activity of documenting the observable traits of passers-by, but this is something we all do, regardless of whether we’re aware of it. I people-watch on trains and park benches, inventing personal histories and relationships with minimal regard for the lives I’m rewriting and erasing.
All around me are familiar faces…
In reality, there’s nothing objective about these “observable traits.” When we slip non-strangers into ready-made categories, we ease ourselves of the burden of actually listening to the stories they share. When we slip strangers into these categories, we replace the fear of uncertainty with the pleasure of self-proclaimed knowledge. This allows us to “identify” who we’re walking next to on the sidewalk, who is standing in front of us on the train, who we socialize with at work, and who we ask on dates. This enables feminists to advocate on behalf of some women and girls, but let LGBTQ folks and people of color slip through the cracks. This permits us to question the veracity of a person’s sexual orientation if it doesn’t align with our own. This frames our vision so that women who have been sexually assaulted are “sexually assaulted women,” “battered women,” “women victims” or “women survivors,” but never just women. They are seldom women adorned with the specificity they see in themselves.
To quote Sonia Sanchez, a remarkable poet whom the Moxies heard last week, “we are what we are what we never think we are.” This week, I was struck by a young woman’s account of how biphobia has impacted her in the wake of the Orlando shooting. In the article, she describes the benefits and shortcomings of “passing” as a bisexual. Although she avoids discrimination when holding her male spouse’s hand in public, the very assumption that underlies others’ indifference to this show of affection is that she is heterosexual; her actions are sexually permissible for this reason only. The erasure perpetrated by those assumptions, disguised as “passing privilege,” slips through the cracks with a collection of others. She is invisible, and her invisibility causes me to question how many passers-by I am not really seeing.
You examine such a simple, yet powerful, everyday activity. You’re right, we all do it, we all make snap judgements of those around us. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we identify and classify others. When is is appropriate or even what classifications should we be using? While I don’t think that classifying people is necessarily an inherently bad thing to do, harm results when we reduce people to only those labels. “Black” or “middle class” may be accurate descriptors of someone, but the problem comes when we don’t push past those surface labels. How can we better see those passer-by in our lives?
When we were talking the other day you prompted us to think about how some identity markers are mapped onto visible signs (gender and race for example) while others can be less visible (class and sometimes sexuality or religion for example, but we were particularly talking about class). I think this is really insightful.
I’m also struck, in general, by the pairing of the language of identity and visibility here and in the way you end your above post. For example, you wonder about all the times we might not really see a person when we interpret visible cues as identity categories. I like the way you add to this how a part of what falls through the cracks in the process is the opportunity to listen to the stories which make a person complex.
I sometimes wonder whether the goal is to truly see a person, or rather to allow for more space (maybe I should say darkness) in relationships and society that would affirm the possibility that people are unknowable, complex, contradictory, indeterminate, and rendered alive through change.