Getting personal
Installment number five: Outgroup hostility.
The thing about ingroup bias is that it contributes more to favorable thinking about your ingroup than active negative thinking about outgroups. Not even the most cohesive and homogenous group prefers to actively denigrate “others” in lieu of simply ignoring them and carrying about in their own insular circle-jerk land. Hostility toward outgroups rarely occurs independently; such hostility only arises in competition. It is defensive. It’s generated in response to a perceived threat, which can be as simple as the mere proximity (not physical proximity; I’ll explain later) of an other.
So if you live your life on the cusp a group you don’t belong to, you simply feel like you’re invisible.
You’ll walk like a ghost among them. You will be invited to half of their social activities but never hear about the others, simply because they habitually forget you exist and no one thinks to tell you. You may be invited to the party, but you’ll be deliberately excluded from the afterparty, once everyone gets drunk and starts confessing their shameful secrets or making out with each other. They do not want to meet up with you for lunch tomorrow. Though you frequently occupy the same physical spaces as them, no one speaks to you. They will not allow you to get emotionally close to them. They are apathetic to you.
It’s only when (by some miracle) you become visible to one of them, or find your way into one’s life, that you are treated like an interloper. They’ll feel at liberty to discreetly criticize you and pit themselves against you in competition unsolicited. You will perpetually experience the uneasy feeling of having trespassed somewhere. It’s only now that you start to feel some of the outward rejection and hostility, in place of the neutral exclusion you were feeling before.
But it’s only natural. It’s like a herd of bison assuming their defensive stance, even though you’re only dealing with one person. That’s the point, after all: group identity and personal identity are inalienable for those who belong to a cohesive social group.
So. Suppose that due to whatever circumstances (mutual friend, etc.), you end up spending an inordinate amount of time around one of them, and after a year or more of getting used to you, they figure out they’re in love with your “soul” or something. It’s a very last-man-on-earth type of situation. Very flattering for you. (Never mind that you don’t even like this arrangement, or this person particularly. You allow it to progress though, because for external reasons you happen to be suicidal and paralyzed in a state of profound dispassion.)
Even though they’re obviously attracted to you enough to harass you for your company more frequently than you’d like, and to have sex with you, they still think of you as an “other” and accordingly refuse to begrudge you any credit.
Compliments are always reluctant and indirect: you dress well, you have nice hair, you are appealing in presentation. (“You try too hard.”) That overhead light hits you in such flattering way.
But you are not attractive. Oh of course not, anything but that.*
His friend thinks you’re cute. “He’s just saying that to piss me off.” The clincher here is that he isn’t saying this to piss you off.
It’s all these subtle little cues that reveal a person’s latent attitudes.
*This is a simple attribution bias. When someone you don’t want to think highly of (an enemy or competitor in this case) appeals to you, you are wont to attribute it to the shirt, the haircut, the angle of the lighting. When someone you want to think highly of (an ingroup member) appeals to you, the credit goes to them — “they are attractive.” — whether or not it objectively should.
You make a comment in passing that the two of you have a similar skin tone.
“I’m paler than you,” he says defensively. And, you’re clearly proud of it.
“We’re pretty close,” you’ll say.
Since he won’t argue with something blatantly evident, he says “it’s probably this soft lighting.”
The thing is, I don’t see why being slightly darker or paler than anyone else is something that’s of any consequence. Much less something you should be proud of (or defensive about), unless you have some weird superiority complex about being white.
If you are centered and level-headed, being in a situation like this hasn’t the power to shift or alter your perception of yourself. But even though it doesn’t change what you know cognitively, it can change the way you feel. It will make you feel small. It will make you feel like nothing. Just in case you’d ever dared not to feel like nothing before. It’s a relationship that, despite not being abusive, is still quite toxic in its own right.
Love is warm and affirming, not competitive, critical and alienating — except for this kind of love. You and they will never be allies, you’ll be frienemies indefinitely. You will exist uneasily alongside each other. They will never give you a square compliment… or ease up on the back-handed ones.
And they may grow to love you (what I mean here is care about you), but their perception of you never changes.
He to this day text messages me to tell me about the new developments in his life. I to this day almost never feel compelled to respond. (What desire would a person have to maintain contact with someone who behaves like this toward them? Desperation for acceptance? That’s not my style.) He wonders why.
