When you find yourself subject to stereotyping, it is understandable if you try to break it. Allow me to elaborate. When travelling, you are seen by people whom you don’t necessarily know. People have a certain image of me, mostly associated with wearing eye-glasses and spending every second of my free time reading heavy-weight books. Except for wearing eye-glasses, the rest is accurate as I do read lots of books and I do spend most of my waking hours reading and writing. Still there is more to me than the frame I’m being squeezed in, because simply I’m a woman! And there is more to a woman than what she allows the public to see. Women are known to multi-task; not only play different roles but play them well. Thus, if you sit next to me in a plane and catch me reading a gossip magazine, don’t get shocked. If you see me watching a Disney movie in the cinema, don’t get shocked. If you see me – God forbids- shopping, don’t get shocked. There is more to me than the image you see.

Moving to a more general perspective on stereotyping, let’s talk about profiling!

How would it feel to be profiled? People tend to stereotype others in order to understand them. The problem exists when we don’t move beyond the first impressions, and when we solidify these stereotypes and turn them into profiles of others and build upon them the basis of our interaction. Here is when everything goes terribly wrong.

Once a certain stereotype is circulated and multiplied, it goes out of hand. It can take years to break it, making it a semi-impossible task. Sadly though, some people are born into such state of distortion, where they are (mis)informed by such stereotypes about their identities and place in their societies.

There is always the fear of internalizing such stereotypes by people concerned and turning these distorted images of who they are into self-fulfilling prophecies. The more an individual hears from others, reads in all sort of literature and watches in the media that he is of such mental capability or such demeanor just because he belongs to a certain ethnicity/race, speaks a certain language or comes from a certain background and class, he will most probably be behaving in that specific way. What has been perpetuated through an internalizing process unfortunately turns into the inevitable. When he is told early in his life that he fits a certain profile, his challenge to defy it becomes harder than living within such profile and conforming to it. Living according to what people have defined him to be becomes easier than reconstructing anew identity for himself. 

I used to think of stereotyping only in the western context. When I used to live in London, people were defined according to their skin color, ethnic background, and religion. Some medical and legal forms request that you fill in the country you were born in and your religion, marking out the British from Arabic or Asian origins. Still, we have been witnessing such profiling of Qataris and non-Qataris recently as well which means that we have joined other multicultural countries in their quest to make sense of what multiculturalism means and what it entails for all parties involved. And that is a topic for another post.