"YOU’RE NOT LIKE THE OTHERS": THE SUBTLE ARMOUR OF STEREOTYPES

BY NAOMI L.

There’s a moment, one that plays out quietly but with massive cultural weight, when someone meets a person who doesn’t fit their preconceived ideas about race (or probably any other characteristic).

Imagine this - a White person meets a Black individual who challenges every stereotype they’ve ever absorbed - not loud, not angry, not “urban,” not “intimidating,” not “unintelligent.” Just… human. Complex. Multifaceted.

And instead of saying, “Wow, maybe I’ve been wrong,” the reflexive reaction is often:

“You're not like the others.”

It sounds like a compliment. IT’S NOT!

It’s a coping mechanism, a mental firewall. A way to preserve the prejudice rather than destroy it. Because dismantling a stereotype means confronting the uncomfortable truth that you might’ve been complicit in maintaining it. And that’s hard. So, what happens instead?

A new category is created.

This Black person becomes “an exception.” A unicorn. A one-off. A special case. And the original stereotype? Untouched. Reinforced. Protected.

Why does this happen? It’s the tragedy of any kind of prejudicial thinking, when reality contradicts a bias, we don’t always allow it to expand our worldview. We often just patch the crack in our assumptions.

It’s easier, cognitively and emotionally,  to say “well, you’re different,” than it is to say, “maybe everything I believed was too narrow, too influenced, too incomplete.”

This isn’t just about race, either. It happens with gender. Sexuality. Religion. Class. We love tidy boxes. We love predictability. But human beings? We’re messy, layered and gloriously inconsistent.

What’s the way out? Start with curiosity. When someone disrupts your assumptions, resist the urge to isolate them as an outlier. Instead, take it as evidence that the assumption was flawed to begin with. Ask yourself:

• Where did I get this belief?

• Who benefits from me holding onto it?

• What am I afraid of losing if I let it go?

It’s a quiet revolution to expand our understanding rather than defend ignorance. But it’s a necessary one.

Because real change doesn’t come when we meet “exceptions.” It comes when we stop needing that category altogether.