Assumptions

We all make assumptions about people—all the time.

People make assumptions about me.

· I am overweight—it must mean I am lazy or undisciplined.

· I have long hair—it must mean I am some kind of artist.

· I am brown-skinned—it must mean I am Hispanic or Greek or Middle Eastern or something else.

· I wear black a lot—whatever that means.

Some of these assumptions are correct, and some are incorrect. I used to be a normal weight before I started taking psych meds. Sure, it’s not like I work out a lot, but before I went on the meds, I used to be 60 pounds lighter. The long hair assumption is mosly correct—I am a writer and musician—but at this point in my life, I basically got sick of getting shitty haircuts and having to spend all this mental energy finding someone decent to cut my hair. So I grew it out. And no, I am not Hispanic or Greek or Middle Eastern or something else—I am just a brown-skinned white guy, which means I have had trouble getting cabs, and sometimes I get low ratings from Uber drivers. And I wear black because I like to wear black.

We make assumptions about people all the time, and in the old days, we used to call it stereotyping. The most common form of stereotyping we do is about race. I was on a plane a few weeks ago, sitting in first class, and a short white guy asked a tall black guy if he played basketball. I wanted to crawl into a seat back pocket. As it turns out, the guy used to play basketball, but he wasn’t thrilled about the question, probably because he gets it all the time from idiots. I know a 6-foot-9 black guy who has never played basketball or any sports at all, and he gets very annoyed by the basketball questions. Resist the urge to do this.

Not being a racist, I don’t find race to be terribly useful in stereotyping people. I want to add that I truly believe that America is not a racist country, and a lot of what passes as racism is actually classism. We are very much a classist country. We discriminate heavily against poor people—of all races. How do you know if someone is poor? Their haircut. Their clothes. Their car. Their tattoos. Let me put it this way—I am very particular about what gas stations I go to in Myrtle Beach. In the South, the gas station is where cultures collide—and frequently, where you’ll be panhandled, or accosted, or assaulted. Out of all the gas stations around here, I only go to one—in Pawleys Island. In some parts of town, it might be the riskiest thing you do all year. If I’m driving to Charlotte, I fill up before I go—I don’t want to get gas in Bennettsville, with a per capita income of $10,000, where people have nothing to lose. Bennettsville, South Carolina is where Michael Jordan’s father was murdered—at a gas station. This is all just risk management.

If I am on a plane, sitting in coach, and someone in jorts with a flat-top sits next to me, there is a 100% chance that person is going to take out their phone and play YouTube videos with the sound on. Or Candy Crush. These assumptions are usually correct—I am never surprised. But you have to be careful about assumptions, right? During the pandemic, I was flying somewhere, and I was sitting in coach next to some woman, and she started texting someone (before we took off) that she was sitting next to a guy who was covered in tattoos who was wearing a cat mask. Yup, that’s me. And then I took out my laptop and wrote short stories for the entire flight. As long as I’ve been here, I still clash with the locals. If you see a woman with a Kate Gosselin haircut and a floral print dress, that is a Southerner. If you see a guy with a standard issue haircut, a pink polo shirt and pleated khakis, that is a Southerner. I can predict their income and square footage and décor with 100% accuracy. Maybe a Salt Life sticker on the back of the car, though that is less common these days. There is an aesthetic here that you don’t see anywhere else in the country.

Likewise, it’s not hard to pick out the Wall Street guys in New York. The wealth managers are still wearing suits, of the Hickey-Freeman variety, with Ferragamo ties. The sell-side guys, at least, the well-off ones, are wearing Eton shirts with maybe Incotex pants and horsebit loafers. The hedge fund guys dress casual, but it’s not hard to spot expensive clothes, even casual clothes. Everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg wears a gray T-shirt every day, well, it came out that those T-shirts are special $300 T-shirts. He’s not getting them from Old Navy.

The interesting thing about San Francisco is that the class warfare instinct is so strong that nobody dresses nice, and then you lose track of the social markers. The guy that just whizzed by you on a skateboard might be employee number 30 at Google and have $600 million in the bank. Or he might be homeless. You can’t tell. It’s very disorienting. Just a friendly piece of advice—don’t wear a suit to San Francisco and take a stroll down Market Street. And yes, I know someone who did this recently. You might have heard that the founder of CashApp was murdered on the sidewalk in SoMa, and everyone assumed it was a homeless guy. You know what they say when you assume—you make an ASS out of U and ME. It turned out that the guy was part of some swingers club and it was a jealous boyfriend or husband that killed him.

Because of my own experience with weight, I am very, very gentle with other people who are overweight. One thing that scientists have learned is that genetics is the number one factor in obesity, meaning that there isn’t a lot that can be done about it, so there’s no use in judging people. People are also obese for psychological reasons, i.e., addiction, but we tend to have a lot more empathy for people with substance abuse problems than food addictions, when in reality, food addictions are much harder to beat than drug addictions. Imagine you were a drug addict and you had to take just a little bit of drugs every day. That is what being a food addict is like. And yes, in some cases, people are simply undisciplined, but shut the fuck up, anyway. Yes, I am jealous of some people’s metabolisms. Those were not the cards I was dealt.

This is the point in the piece in which I talk about the situations where someone completely blows up my assumptions about them and turns out to be a peach of a human being where I had assumed them to be a dummy. This happened a lot at Lehman. You might find this hard to believe, but I was a big class warrior at Lehman. I got a lot of mileage out of being the PSD kid in the Mens’ Wearhouse suits. I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those ridiculous Ferragamo print ties, and whenever I saw one, I assumed they were a blue-blood cake-eater. Turns out a lot of those people were really nice people, and I was sitting over in my corner of the trading floor, sulking, resenting everyone for no reason. Later in life, I actually bought some of those ridiculous Hermes ties. Some of these people I am great friends with to this day.

And then, of course, there are assumptions about politics. If you have purple hair, you are probably a liberal, and I don’t think I’ve ever known a conservative with purple hair, and I think the whole point of having purple hear is signaling to other people that you are a liberal. If you see someone wearing a mask in 2025, they are probably a liberal (or they are a germaphobe on a plane). I went out to lunch this afternoon at the local lunch spot and there were a group of goths there. One of the girls was wearing a witch hat with a mask. They looked very out of place in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. The only other person I’ve seen wearing a witch hat not on Halloween was Flava Flav singing “Can’t Truss It” on SNL in 1990, and Flava Flav is actually a conservative. You can make assumptions about conservatives, too, especially men—Oakley blade sunglasses with a gray goatee and cargo shorts. Liberals drive Priuses, conservatives drive Ford F-150s. Liberals run marathons, conservatives lift weights. Liberals watch basketball, and conservatives watch college football. And the bumper stickers are a dead giveaway. I think some people look at me with the hair and the clothes and the tattoos and they assume I am a liberal. Close, but no cigar.

When I was in college, I read one of Dinesh D’Souza’s early books (this was before he lost his squash and was a doctrinaire Reagan conservative) and he talked about situations in which it was appropriate to stereotype. Like me with the gas stations and the risk management discussion. Trump may fashion himself as a man of the people, but I don’t see him going to any gas stations in Myrtle Beach after dark. The point here is to keep an open mind about people. The guy with jorts and a flat-top might be a bestselling author. The chick with purple hair might be an investment banker. Except for the gas stations, most of the time when I make assumptions about someone, I end up regretting it.