The Story Before the Person part 1 (bonus)

Why stereotypes exist—and why curiosity should always have the final word.

I remember a particular joke from my teenage years . There were several of us there, including my older brother. One of the kids had done something silly—something so ridiculous that it made us all laugh. What stayed with me, however, were the words of one of the men who was there. Laughing, he looked at the boy and said:

“Ou gen 3 mal sou tèt: ou sot, ou nwè epi w ayisyen.”

(You’ve got three strikes against you: you’re an idiot, you’re Black, and you’re Haitian.)

Those words made us laugh back then, and I can’t even remember how many times we repeated them to tease one another.

Later, after I left Haiti, I began to realize that what had been nothing more than a joke to us as teenagers carried a much deeper and more tragic meaning for the man who had said it. He had lived in the United States and had eventually been deported.

It was during my years abroad that his words stopped being a joke to me and became something far more unsettling.

In a world where we are constantly competing and surrounded by scammers, being naïve can indeed be a burden. In a world shaped by bias and prejudice, being Black can also be a disadvantage in certain places and under certain circumstances. And beyond being Black, being Haitian can sometimes be seen as a burden—or even as a flaw in itself.

This article, however, is not about racism. It is not a complaint about Haitians. It is about something that goes beyond racism, bias, and prejudice. I would argue that these behaviors we often describe as unjust are, in many ways, the consequences of a deeper concept: stereotypes.

At first, I had no intention of writing this bonus article. It wasn’t part of my plan. But I recently began studying psychology, and during my first course on identity, diversity, and related topics, this word simply stayed in my mind. Around the same time, I was deeply moved by an article Anna | Tender & True published on Substack last month, I Hope You Teach Your Child About Mine, in which she writes about her son. She reveals the remarkable child hidden behind the disability that most people notice first.

That article made me think. And during those moments of reflection, I came to believe that beyond our appearance and our behavior lie the stories we inherit—and the stories that continue to spread around us.

In my opinion, stereotypes do not appear out of nowhere. They are formed from the stories that raised us and from the ones that continue to shape the world around us.

From the moment we are born, we all receive certain characteristics: the color of our skin, our culture, our country, our family, our community, our appearance... Each of those characteristics carries its own stories.

These stories are like an identity compass—or simply a profile card. They are simplified mental images that help us categorize ourselves in a world that is far too complex. They also help us find our place within a community, creating a sense of belonging and similarity.

These stories are not only about ourselves. They are also about other people. We live in a world where comparison is often used to identify, classify, and reassure the group. In that sense, a story is not only a map of who I am. It is also a map of the world. And it is this second function that gives birth to stereotypes.

From this perspective, stereotypes are the beliefs we have developed from these stories. They also become the profile cards we create in our minds about other people. When we meet someone, we often see the stories we have already learned about them before we see the person.

A Black man inherits a general description of White or Asian people from his community, and vice versa. Regardless of our culture or where we come from, we all inherit stories about other groups.

Our behavior—toward ourselves and toward others—is deeply influenced by those stereotypes.

How Stories Become Stereotypes

I worked for ten months in a Chinese restaurant at Disney World. I was part of the dishwashing team. Every dishwasher there was Haitian. That surprised me at first, and some of my coworkers believed it was because of racism. I thought so too, at least in the beginning.

Later, I left Disney and started working at Amazon. There, my fellow Haitians were among the top performers in the warehouse. Our numbers were well above average. Some even reached three times the expected rate.

Little by little, I started thinking about it. I worked extremely hard, yet my paycheck never changed. So I began to slow down and ask myself a simple question: Why should I push myself this hard? I could perform at an average level and the company would have no issue with my performance. So why did I feel the need to do more?

While talking with my uncle, he told me that when he worked as a dishwasher at Disney years earlier, the team wasn’t made up exclusively of Haitians. But over time, Haitians had become known for working so fast and so hard that employees from other nationalities gradually disappeared from the dishwashing team. A task that normally would have taken two hours could be finished in less than one by the Haitian crew.

Looking back, I remember the pressure and the intensity we lived with every day, always trying to finish the work as quickly as possible.

For a while, I criticized that behavior among my fellow Haitians.

Then I realized I was doing exactly the same thing.

This is not something unique to Haitians. When you grow up as part of a minority community, you are often taught that you must work harder than everyone else just to receive the same opportunity.

As the rapper Youssoupha says in one of his songs:

“I had to give everything just to be given half.”

Even in a fair environment, we still put pressure on ourselves to be the best and to give more, unconsciously influenced by the stories we inherited while growing up.

Those behaviors eventually give birth to new stereotypes. In the example of Haitians, employers notice how hard Haitians work and begin repeating that observation. Haitians hear those words, and over time they unconsciously create a sense of expectation within the group itself. The cycle continues.

In a way, we create our own pressure by establishing standards that are shaped by our own beliefs.

Stereotypes also influence the way we treat other people. In many ways, they are the roots of prejudice. Stories provide us with profile cards about others, and from those profile cards emerges an emotional filter—what we feel when we encounter that image: fear, rejection, sympathy, or something else.

From those prejudices come discriminatory actions.

It is important to recognize that discrimination is not always something inherently evil. Discrimination begins the moment our stories stop influencing only the way we see the world and start influencing the decisions we make. We become more likely to give our trust, our opportunities, or our privileges to certain people while denying them to others. Even what is commonly called positive discrimination, despite its intention to correct past injustices, still operates on this same principle of treating people differently based on their membership in a particular group.

Those prejudices can eventually lead to violent reactions such as racism and many other forms of discrimination.

If we look more closely, we can see that these mechanisms follow a clear pattern. Everything begins with an observed reality. Then comes the interpretation we make of it. That interpretation becomes a story. And stories are almost never entirely true, nor entirely false.

In his song “Trinity,” Lucky Dube describes the tension that exists between two groups of people who hold different views of one another. He summarizes that tension in one simple line:

“When you see a black man, you see an aggressor. And when I see a white man, I see an oppressor.”

The question is: why? Why does each group expect something negative from the other?

Employers who have repeatedly seen Haitians work extremely hard may eventually come to expect every Haitian employee to behave the same way. If one day they meet someone who doesn’t, it may create a sense of disappointment, which in turn can create tension between employers and employees.

All of this simply shows that every story has an origin. More often than not, however, we classify an entire group based on the actions of a single individual. Someone who has had one bad experience with a Black man may quickly assume that all Black men are the same. They tell that story to those around them, who then repeat it to others, and the cycle continues. Each time the story is retold, it changes a little. It becomes more dramatic. Eventually, the original event may be forgotten altogether, while the message itself continues to spread.

The original story was not false. That person really did have a negative experience with a Black man. But neither was the story completely true, because not every Black man is the same. The same can be said about the story of White people being oppressors.

Over time, we become trapped in this cycle. We keep repeating the stories we inherited while creating new ones that reinforce what we already believe. Our minds, often without us realizing it, are constantly searching for evidence that confirms our existing beliefs.

In Haiti, we often grow up hearing that other nations are against us. When we meet someone from another country, influenced by those stereotypes, we instinctively become defensive. We begin to see provocation everywhere, racism in every small gesture. We become more attentive to anything that confirms the story we already carry within us. Then we react to an injustice that, at times, exists only in our own interpretation. The other person may sense that defensiveness and respond with a defensive wall of their own.

Stereotypes do more than block communication. They prevent genuine encounters. As long as we see people through the stories we inherited about them, we rarely give them the opportunity to tell us their own.

In that sense, the system of stereotypes, while both universal and comforting, traps us within an incomplete view of reality.

To be continued…