Hipsters like skinny jeans, obscure music, and fair trade coffee. Sorority girls only wear leggings and pearls. Athletes never open books.
But the danger of a stereotype is not necessarily its tendency towards falseness. In reality, many stereotypes are fairly accurate. Rather, stereotypes are wrong because they dehumanize the people they describe.
When we see people and put them into boxes, our minds flood with preconceived notions. We put boundaries around those people, and thus limit what we think they can do, say, or be.
This is both sickening and frustrating. If every individual is a whole being with a soul, mind, and heart, then developing a list of adjectives by which to define someone is, in effect, deciding their fate within society without acknowledging their eternal value. And humans are created in the image of God, not in the image of society.
Of course, individuals are responsible for their own actions and friends. Yet this does not justify our decision to put them in a particular box—boxes labeled fat, skinny, sorority girl, frat boy, Republican, Democrat, rich, poor, prostitute, preacher’s daughter, and so on.
My time at Hillsdale has been an incredible, sanctifying journey so far. As a freshman, I called people from the town “Townies” like everyone else did. By Townie, we usually mean an obese, grungy, and probably smelly person who doesn’t shower, wears gross clothes, shops exclusively at Wal-Mart, uses curse words, and probably lives on some kind of run-down farm.
But it wasn’t until I joined Young Life and met some Townies that I grew disgusted with myself for calling these individuals something so degrading. Before, a Townie’s story was merely a comic strip of flat events featuring alcoholic fathers and uncaring mothers. Yet I was humbled to realize that their life struggles were full of real heartache and depth.
I have come to know a few high school girls through my time in Young Life. Even after three years, I know that the various hurts I’ve observed are just a snapshot of what lies beneath. To some of these girls, “I live with my stepfather” means not only an absent father, but the biting sting of abandonment. “He broke up with me” means not only the end of a relationship, but a cry for constant love. Like our own, this pain is profound and their tragedies are real, contrary to the simplicity that the stereotype dictates.
I had been failing to see the dimensions of their pain and consequently, of their souls, by focusing on their appearance. Indeed, as C.S. Lewis once noted, “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” By summarizing and labeling these immortal souls as Townies, we reduce them to disposable caricatures.
Furthermore, when we classify somebody according to a certain place in society, we set up expectations for that individual. By maintaining those expectations, it becomes harder and harder to do ministry. The classification separates and divides. What a failure it is for the Christian to detach from his fellow man. To have a relationship necessarily means to relate—which is something that division hinders. If ministry entails relationships, then this division is incompatible with the Great Commission.
These people—human beings—are alive. Townies are not the others, as if Hillsdale College students are the Platonic Form of individuals and Townies are the lesser of us.
Not everybody who uses the word Townie is making a conscious effort to stereotype somebody from the town—but the real matter is this: we should be making a conscious effort not to classify individuals. We Hillsdale students need to eliminate Townie from our vocabularies.