Tattoo's are where we'll start. Have you ever heard somebody claim that somebody else's tattoo is stupid and meaningless ? "Did you hear that becky got stars on her arm? That's like the dumbest tattoo you can ever get." Well the obvious (or maybe not) retort to that is that the person probably holds more value and finds more meaning in the tattoo than the person making fun of them does. Let me create an example to demonstrate my next point.
Becky gets a yin yang symbol on her upper back. Scott sees the tattoo and thinks that Becky has it because it represents good and evil (which is a Western misconception), so he doesn't even question her about it. But really Becky has it because she likes to be reminded of finding balance in her life. Since Scott never asked her what it meant however, he may associate things that she does with good and evil, thus creating many labels and views which aren't correct. Okay, now if you've been able to follow me up until this point, I have the final connection to make.
Take that scenario and blow it up to encompass all of social life as we know it. Race is a narrow look at how just one thing about a person can make us label them in our head as associated with other people of the same race. But even broader, I'm willing to argue that just about everything that people do gives us clues as to who they are. And you might say well yeah, that's common sense. But there's one problem here. We don't know the intentions (meaning of the tattoo) of others. Somebody can say something that you find completely strange so you may not want to talk to them again, but they probably didn't find it strange because they saw different meaning in their own words. So, stop judging others based on what little you know about them, and try to dig deeper.
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