By Amanda Knox

While cataloging new inventory at the bookstore, I’m consistently surprised by the market value of individual books. Sure, textbooks tend to be expensive, mass market paperbacks tend to be cheap. Most of the time, I’m dealing with titles somewhere in the middle—paperbacks going for $7-15, hardcovers going from $15-25, depending on the condition, the author, the publishing house, the date of publication, the earlier or later the printing, the popularity. But there are a surprising number of surprises. A dusty hardcover in frayed dust jacket going for at least $200. A pristine art tome coming in at a penny.

People are so much more complicated than books, very much thanks to our ability to discern meaning from pattern. But there’s a fine line between discerning meaning and injecting it, and I’m so sensitive about it. Even making inaccurate assumptions about the market value of a book reminds me that I’m ever confronted by situations where I discover people, including me, making this same mistake.
Just this past week two of my friends were looking out the window, people-watching. The first pointed out a young woman walking with a friend, and said to the second, “That one looks like your type. She looks smart.”

What immediately struck me was how seemingly innocuous a statement it was. If you’re going to make gratuitous assumptions about a person, surely it doesn’t hurt the object of your voyeurism if the assumption is gratuitously positive. And yet, it’s stunningly pervasive that we project, especially onto women, traits that we desire in them, whether they really exist or not. It puts undeserved pressure on a person, and becomes an obstacle to seeing and understanding them for who they really are. Recognizing an opportunity to engage in conversation about that, I said, “What makes you think you can tell what a person is like by looking at them through the window?”

“You can just tell. By the way she walks, by the way she’s dressed, by the way she’s talking to her friend…” said one.

“Experience around people you like that gives you an ability to tell if a person is your type or not,” said the other.

“Don’t you think you’re projecting more than you’re gleaning?”

They shrugged.

I quickly realized that the obstacle to our understanding each other had to do with stakes. It was easy for my friends to make the mistake of injecting meaning because in their experience, the consequences of that mistake are subtle, indirect, harmless. But in my experience, they are not.

Exonerees—people convicted and later exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit—are my tribesmen. We come in all shapes, sizes—black, brown, white, young, old, thick, thin—from all backgrounds and all levels of education, from all places where there are people in the world. Here in the United States, my tribesmen tend to be male, black or brown, and older than me, not because they tended to be older than me when they were wrongfully incarcerated, but because the average exoneree spends at least fourteen years wrongfully imprisoned. Despite standing out as young, white, and female, one of the many things that we all share in common is that other people—strangers through a window—projected their ideas about what we were like onto us—with devastating results.

As a young woman—like the “smart” girl my friends saw through the window—and as an exoneree, I’m especially not new to people assuming of me what they want to believe. At times those assumptions have been gratuitously positive. Other times those assumptions have been sensationally, dehumanizingly, gratuitously monstrous. Either way, and whatever the level of the stakes, it strikes me as a dangerous habit to cultivate that undermines real empathy and intelligence when encountering another person. My tribesmen know that. We can recognize one of our own in an instant, and we also can’t wait to get to know each other as we really are.