Totalizing

          According to Julia T. Wood, “totalizing occurs when we respond to a person as if one label (one we have chosen or accepted from others) totally represents who he or she is” (Wood, 2012, p. 98). At first I stumbled a bit with this concept; it sounded a lot like stereotyping to me, but I soon discovered the differences between the two terms. Stereotyping happens when we take the characteristics of an entire group and use them to define one person. Conversely, we totalize others if we focus on only one facet of an individual’s personal identity and completely ignore everything else about them. I believe it’s harmful to live your life with a totalizing mindset. Imagine how many possibilities would go unnoticed if all we saw about a certain individual was one aspect of his or her personality. It could be that a person’s actual identity is entirely different from the identity we perceive them to have, and we would never know it if we were totalizing them.

          I first became painfully aware of how often I totalize others when I began working as an RA in Selleck this summer. Many of the residents here are athletes, and many of them are football players. According to my coworkers, the football players in particular are widely known for being rather shady characters. So far, I’ve seen them write their phone numbers on doors to try to get girls, muscle through doors that won’t budge until you scan your N-card, and ask their RAs to wake them up in the mornings and make sure they eat breakfast. These guys are usually pretty big and tall and for a skinny little girl like me, that looks pretty intimidating.

With all this in mind, my mind immediately jumped to ‘football player’ and everything I associated with football players every time I saw a guy in Selleck who looked like a life-size version of my stick figure drawing shown above. Note the facial expressions each of these stick figures is wearing.

          Two things happened last Monday that made me realize how I was thinking about these residents. Firstly, I read chapter 4 in our textbook and learned what totalizing is. Secondly, I was walking into Selleck for dinner while a big, beefy-looking, obviously-a-football-player guy was walking out. Much to my surprise, he held the door open for me; to be honest, I expected him to nearly bowl me over opening the door (it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d experienced that at a football player’s hands). The fact that I was shocked at this was all it took for me to feel ashamed. All I saw about this individual was that he was a football player and that there couldn’t possibly be any more depth or complexity to him. Based on this, I never would have thought he was capable of something as polite and simple as opening a door for me. As shown below, I have changed my stick figure drawing to more accurately represent my improved mindset concerning football players in Selleck. Note that the facial expressions have changed.

          I realize there are situations where totalizing can be useful. For instance, if I saw a man dressed in black carrying a bloody ax in a dark, deserted alley, I probably wouldn’t approach him. However, I understood after the encounters I described above that I needed to find ways to combat my tendency to harmfully totalize football players. What would happen if I thought about them as students, brothers, sons, and friends? How would my perception of them change if I didn’t stop trying to see who they are once I notice their height and muscle? There’s more to people than what you see, especially if you limit what you see to one thing. Unlike my stick figure illustrations, the football players I interact with on a daily basis have names and personalities too.