Grace Dickhaut
Professor Patterson
Eng 110
03/25/2025
Why are people so mean?
There is a very common saying that all of us humans have grown up on. Do you remember someone ever saying to you, “never judge a book by its cover”? That saying was thrown around a lot while I was growing up whether it was by my parents trying to teach you the way of being ‘nice’ or a teacher telling me not to form an opinion on something just from first glance. I can remember a time when I was little and I saw someone that did not look like me and I made a comment about it. My mother was very quick to bite back at me and say, ‘Grace, you never judge a book by its cover.’ By hearing this saying, you should believe that it is true. Little does everyone know that we as human beings or as a collective society cannot escape the biases we already have inside of our heads. The identities of individuals are often shaped not only by personal experiences but also by powerful external forces such as societal expectations, racial stereotypes, and legal pressures. When you look at the works like Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, Life After Death by Damien Echols, and The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it becomes evident that individuals are forced to contend with imposed identities, which can either constrain or empower them as they navigate the complex intersection of public and private self-perceptions.
Society can hold a lot of opinions towards a person and the way they need to act, look, speak, and all other types of things. “So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” is how Adichie words it in her speech, The Danger of a Single Story. Whether you have realized it or not, it has probably happened to you, your best friend, and all of the people around you. From my own personal experience I have been a victim of it and also someone who has demonstrated holding rumors and my own opinions against a person. As Adichie says in her speech called, The Danger of a Single Story, “ I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story.” I remember when I was in middle school and there was this new girl that everyone was talking about. The things people would say about her were not the nicest. They would say things like, ‘she is so rude,’ ‘she looks like she came from a dump,’ and ‘she wears the same clothes everyday, ew.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I do not want to be her friend if everyone is saying all these rude things about her. That was until I got to know her. When I would talk to her, she would be the sweetest human being with manners and a genuine tone. What no one knew about her was that she was a foster kid who moved around to different homes all the time. She came off as rude to everyone because she did not know any better, not having a guardian to show her right from wrong. After I had one conversation with her, we were best friends through the rest of our middle school experience. I then got to high school. One thing to know about me is that I came out as bisexual my junior year. After I did that, my whole friend group, somehow, flipped a switch. No one would invite me to events like sleepovers or hangouts, and if I were there I would be forced to sleep on the floor or on the living room couch. It was the worst year of my life. This was all because, in their eyes, me being gay meant that I had a crush on one of them. I had been friends with all of these people for years, and they were able to drop me like it was nothing due to one characteristic of me that ultimately had nothing to do with them. When you begin to learn about an individual, one small thing can make or break the way that you and society begin to treat each other. We as people need to step away from the, “Single Story.”
One thing that this world will never be able to escape is racism. We have initial biases just based off of someone’s skin. It is genuinely something that none of us can control. What we can control is the way we react and treat the people we have opinions about. Although I have never struggled with said stereotypes, in the article Born a Crime written by Trevor Noah, Noah claims he was judged from the second he had come out the womb. During the time he was born, his birth being ‘mixed-race’ was severely frowned upon. His birth was seen as ill\egeal under many apartheid’s laws. As Noah explains, “one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race.” His mother would spend nights in jail after getting caught with a ‘mixed baby’ and Trevor was unable to make friends because he could not befriend the white or colored kids. This one small story from Trevor Noah does not seem to be fair. You can tell that both Trevor and his mother are both very strong just based on their upbringing. The hardships that they had to face should not have been put in place beforehand anyways. Noah was judged the day that he was born because he was quite literally “born a crime”. Instead of judging Noah because of the parents he has and the color of his skin, he should have been judged off the way he is as a person. Trevor Noah is now an actor, writer, producer, comedian, political commentator, and television host. The people who watch him on the television at home love the person he is because he is so light hearted and a jokester. That is what we should have been basing our judgement on this whole time.
As someone who grew up with a father working in the system, our legal systems have always been a little off. Even though, personally, I have never struggled to regain a life outside of a wrongful conviction, I know that Damien Echols did. Damien Echols was wrongfully convicted of killing three children for a cult. He was wrongfully convicted because of the clothes that he wore, the music he would listen to, and the books he would read. In his own words, “I was treated like a monster, like a thing that wasn’t even human, just because I dressed in black and listened to certain types of music.” The prosecution and law enforcement pushed the narrative that aligned with the public’s fears about Satanic panic and rebellion of the youth in the early ’90s. The identification of Damien Echols as the culprit was shaped more by prejudices and societal fears than by actual evidence, and it had a profound impact on his life. Especially when it had to do with the law, this doesn’t seem fair for Damien. Just because of the clothes that Damien wore, he was wrongfully convicted of the murder of children. The legal system being able to justify that it was him, is what is wrong. They were later given literal evidence of the murder not being him, and they refused to go back to trial. All because he did not fit in well with the average, ‘normal’ youth.
We as people do have our own pre-set biases. These biases were shown by the arts of many, like Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, Life After Death by Damien Echols, and The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Unfortunately enough we cannot escape it, but collectively as a society we need to be able to understand and address these biases so people like them don’t have to feel bad for being who they truly are.

Sources
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: Noah, T. (2016). Born a crime: Stories from a South African childhood. Spiegel & Grau.

Life After Death by Damien Echols: Echols, D. (2012). Life after death. Spiegel & Grau.

The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (TED Talk): Adichie, C. N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story