You Represent More than Yourself
One man’s misdeed is everyone’s misdeed.
For the most part, I do not do things for other people’s approval, whether that is wearing my hair in a frizzy updo, visiting certain places, or even posting my pictures on social media. The primary motivation for me has always been what I want or am feeling like in the moment. If others however happen to approve, I do not dwell on it (even if I momentarily enjoy it). As such, I sometimes forget that what I choose for myself impacts others too, specifically the stakeholders in my life.
By stakeholders I mean my family, friends, classmates, colleagues, church members, fellow Nigerians, writers, even black people.
And every time I show up in a new space, strangers will — by default — make judgements about the people who look like or are affiliated with me.
It is only in light of the recent happenings in my life that I have come to appreciate this reality, and let me tell you: it is a heavy weight to carry, one everyone of us must carry. Unfortunately (maybe not), we do not get to choose to live without this weight. As long as we belong to the human race, as long as our history can be traced to a people (dead or alive, related or not), we become the premise upon which judgments (sometimes stereotypes) about those people will be formed.
Learning from Experience
When I achieve any worthy feat, I typically share the news with my family who, expectedly, celebrate the positive reinforcement that it lends to the family name. What I am still getting used to, however, is the number of people who own and take pride in my achievement.
My last worthy feat saw me receiving different congratulatory texts, and I noticed a striking pattern in those messages, texts of “you did this for us,” and “you gave us a good name.” At no point when I was investing sweat and time did I think what my success would mean to them. Importantly, I am not related to these people and in fact share a very distant connection to them, but by winning, I enabled a positive perception of them.
Think of a Nigerian student who breaks a decades-long record of academic achievement in top schools like Harvard or Yale, or a woman who beats Elon Musk to make humanity multiplanetary. By achieving such feats, the former provides a basis to judge the capabilities of Nigerian students positively, while the latter provides a new appreciation for the ingenuity of women.
Just the same, when we are deceitful and untrustworthy, our actions, though an expression of individual agency, affects innocent people who contributed no part in our deceitfulness. A classic case is the “all men are cheats” trope which categorizes men as inherent cheats, even though there are men who abhor cheating.
While we make choices out of our own personal agency, we cannot protect other people, i.e., the stakeholders in our lives, from the reputational impact of those choices. If we win, our friends, family, colleagues, race, and country people win too. But if we make selfish choices that cause us embarrassment, the same people will share in the embarrassment with us.
Some might derive a sadistic pleasure from knowing that they do not have to live with the embarrassment alone, but it’s not worth it because, (i) society thrives — among other things — on social cohesion, and when a member of that society threatens it, they will be ostracized, (ii) even if the embarrassment is shared, individuals bear the shame of their actions alone.
All this to say that in any society, we are more than the sum total of our individual parts. We, to borrow the words of Maya Angelou, “come as one but stand as ten thousand” on any given day. We are [insert name] but also male (or female), black (or white), Nigerian (or any other nationality), and wherever we show up, we show up as all these parts.
I believe this is an instructive lesson to always keep in mind, that, in fact, if more people were conscious of this, they would be better behaved.
