Complex Numbers

Pennies from Hell

And now, the final entry for this round of "JAFBG"  [XGC]. Tomorrow, I'll go back to riffing on links I found. I have a bunch in the queue now.

What stereotypes accurately describe you? Are you comfortable with them? Which would you like to change?

When I was a kid, once the other kids found out I was Jewish, they'd drop pennies near me to see if I'd pick them up.

For a while I resisted, but then I was like "fuck it" (I learned to cuss early, but unfortunately before I learned not to do it in front of adults), leaned into it, and started picking them up.

Their loss was my gain, and as long as they were going to do shit to me for being different, I might as well make money at it.

Naturally, they figured out what I was doing and stopped. That's when they started asking if Christian babies taste like chicken.

(They taste like pork, but I didn't know that then because my parents tried to keep kosher.) (That's a joke, in case anyone still thinks that bullshit that's been making the rounds for centuries is true. Think we can eradicate fake news? Think again.)

Anyway, these days, no one would know it if it didn't come up in conversation every once in a while. I'm not in the least bit ashamed of my heritage, but it's not like I'm a vegan or do Crossfit and have to shout it to the world. I look like an ordinary Euro-American middle-aged man, and I abandoned religion long ago. After all, it leads to pernicious misinformation; see above.

No, I'm a white guy with facial hair who loves craft beer, and that's a stereotype I can live with. I walk into a brewery and usually I think people look up and go "Oh, hey, it's a beer guy." And yet I don't identify with most of melanin-disadvantaged America. People have tried to start up conversations with me about how wonderfully magical and holy Trump was, and I just steer the conversation away from the political realm. After all, the guy doesn't even drink beer; how could I trust him?

Personally, I think we'd all do well to get rid of the whole stereotype thing altogether. Even the positive ones can be degrading. You end up seeing people not as people but as representatives of a subgroup: women drivers, Blacks eating fried chicken, Jews hoarding money, Scots hoarding money (but for some reason it's a positive trait for them), the Irish drinking a lot, white people who can't stand anything spicier than mayonnaise, Mexicans who only eat spicy food, Asian math whizzes, Roma stealing everything that's not nailed down, the French scowling at anything that's not French, Canadians saying "sorry" a lot, US Americans shooting everything in sight, and so on.

Just stop already. It's the worst kind of confirmation bias: you see someone exhibiting a stereotypical trait for their subgroup, and ignore the same trait in other subgroups, so it reinforces your prejudices. And we all have prejudices; they're mostly just shortcuts that bypass a lot of the hard work that it takes to really get to know someone.

I still pick pennies up off the street, though. One day I'll buy a Coke with all my found cash, and then we'll see who has the last laugh. Now, where did I put the controls to that space laser?