Unlikeness.

Early Saturday. Jonathon Ferrell, a 24-year-old former football player for Florida A&M University, had a serious car accident: his car left the road and crashed into a ravine . He managed to get out of the car and walked to a nearby home for help. A woman who lived in this house didn’t open the door and called police. Police soon arrived and when Jonathon rushed to them, one of the police officers fired his gun at him 12 times, so that the young unarmed man died.  A simple common story from American news. One of the multiple stories about police in the USA, in France, in Norway, in Russia etc. The question is not only why the police officer was shooting at an unarmed person. There are other even more important questions: why didn’t a homeowner open the door when she heard someone asking for a help? Why did she call police as if she was in danger? How would she behave if it would be a white guy asking for help? How would the police officer behave if it would be a white guy? Last question is rather uncomfortable and annoying for modern “tolerant” and “anti-racist” America, a lot of politicians and journalists would like to avoid discussing it. However, this question comes to mind right away when you hear such stories.

Why are we inclined to trust people who look like us more than those who look different? How does this mechanism of “recognizing” and “reception” work? Even well-educated and intelligent people feel some distance at first with those who have different color of skin, shape of eyes, shape of face etc. You expect people who have appearance different from yours to be different in everything: in their behavior, in their principles, in their habits, in their speech etc. It scares you because you don’t know what to expect and you perceive this different person as a stranger even before he does anything or says anything.

The problem is that this suspicious and distrustful attitude to everything different from what we get used to isn’t natural or basic feature of human beings. My 4 years old nephew while visiting me in United States met a lot of black people that he has never seen before and he didn’t have any problems or fears in communicating with them, he never pointed at them saying “Look, mom, he is black”. In Moscow, at home one of his good friends is from Egyptian family, a swarthy and black-haired boy. And they never discussed the fact that they look different. Appearance isn’t essential point in communication for little kids. That proofs that all racist and sexual fears are the social phenomena, they appear as we grow up listening to mass media which tells us that people that look like us are beautiful, smart and successful and that unlikeness is dangerous and suspicious.