Let me be deadass with y’all for a minute.
I been thinking about something that been sitting heavy on me — the kind of thought that hits you in the shower at 2am and won’t let you go back to sleep. It’s simple on the surface, but the deeper you go, the more you realize how much it explains about everything wrong with how we move in this world.
However you was raised becomes your normal.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. But sit with it.
If you grew up in a house where dinner was on the table every night at six, the family sat together, and nobody left without saying grace — that ain’t just a memory, that’s your baseline. That’s what love looks like to you. That’s what a functioning household looks and feels like in your bones. Now somebody else grew up where dinner was whatever you could find, and the adults in the house were either working double shifts or nowhere to be found. That ain’t dysfunction to them — that’s just Tuesday. That was their normal.
Neither one of those people is broken. They just built their whole understanding of life from two completely different blueprints.
The Problem With “Normal”
Here’s where it gets real. When your normal is all you know, everything outside of it looks strange. Looks wrong, even. And that’s where the judging starts — not always from a place of malice, but from a place of genuine confusion.
Psychology Today has written extensively on how our early environments literally wire our brains to perceive certain behaviors and structures as baseline reality. It ain’t just preference — it’s neuroscience. Your childhood is coding that runs in the background of every single decision you make as an adult.
So when somebody from the outside looks at your household and says “that’s not right,” and you looking right back at them like they the alien — y’all are both telling the truth. You just speaking different languages built from different lived realities. And neither one of y’all even knows it half the time.
That’s lowkey one of the most dangerous dynamics in how we relate to each other. Because we don’t argue from facts. We argue from feelings that feel like facts because they was installed in us before we even had the words to question them.
Societal Norms? Whose Society, Though?
Now here’s where I really want y’all to stay with me — because this is the part that gets glossed over.
“Societal norms” gets thrown around like it’s neutral. Like there’s one universal rulebook that everybody had access to. But fam, whose society are we talking about? Because the norms that get called standard in this country were largely written by, for, and around a very specific kind of household. A very specific culture. A very specific history.
If you grew up somewhere that reflected those norms — in the suburbs, two-parent household, certain tax bracket — then “societal norms” just feel like… common sense. Like oxygen. You don’t even think about it.
But if you grew up in Harlem, or Compton, or the South Side, or any community that was historically cut off from those resources and structures? Those “norms” might as well be a foreign language. Not because something is wrong with your community — but because your community developed its own norms, its own codes, its own ways of surviving and loving and building, under entirely different conditions.
Sociologist William Julius Wilson spent decades documenting how economic isolation doesn’t just affect income — it reshapes culture, family structure, values, and community behavior. That ain’t an excuse. That’s a context. And context matters more than most people are willing to admit.
The Stereotypes Ain’t Just Lazy — They’re Dangerous
Now here’s the part that really bugs me out.
Because we don’t take time to understand each other’s normal, we fill in the gaps with stereotypes. And stereotypes ain’t always built from hate — sometimes they’re built from straight-up ignorance. From never actually sitting across the table from somebody whose world was different from yours.
You see somebody moving a certain way, talking a certain way, making decisions that don’t make sense to you — and instead of asking “what formed this person?”, the default is to reach for the most comfortable explanation. And comfortable usually means reductive. Stereotypes are mental shortcuts, and shortcuts don’t have the bandwidth for nuance.
Research from Stanford’s SPARQ project has shown that even well-meaning people carry implicit biases rooted in cultural misunderstanding — not hatred, but unfamiliarity that gets codified into assumption. And once an assumption locks in, it’s mad hard to shake.
That’s how misunderstandings compound. One person acting from their normal, another person interpreting it through their normal, and neither one pausing long enough to say — wait, where did you learn that? What did the world look like where you came from?
Add Culture and Ethnicity Into the Mix?
Oh, it gets deeper. Way deeper.
Because now you ain’t just dealing with two individuals with different upbringings — you dealing with entire histories, entire lineages of trauma, tradition, celebration, and survival that stretch back generations. Cultural and ethnic identity adds layers to what your normal looks and feels like.
Think about something as simple as eye contact. In a lot of Western, predominantly white cultural spaces, maintaining eye contact signals confidence, honesty, respect. But in various East Asian, West African, and Indigenous cultures, prolonged eye contact can be considered disrespectful or aggressive — especially toward elders. Neither interpretation is wrong. They’re both deeply held cultural truths.
But if you don’t know that — if nobody ever told you — you gonna walk away from that interaction with a whole misread of who that person is.
Cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall called this kind of invisible cultural difference “the hidden dimension” — the unspoken rules, rhythms, and assumptions that govern how we communicate without us even realizing we’re doing it. And the further apart two people’s cultural backgrounds are, the wider that hidden gap becomes.
Now multiply that by race in America, where culture and ethnicity come loaded with centuries of tension, displacement, and misrepresentation. The distance don’t just get wider — it gets mined. Full of things ready to blow up the second somebody steps on the wrong spot without knowing it was ever there.
So What Do We Do With This?
I ain’t gonna stand here and pretend I got a clean answer. I don’t think one exists.
But I do think the starting point is curiosity over judgment. Asking instead of assuming. Recognizing that when somebody does something that seems wild to you — something that doesn’t compute — the first question shouldn’t be “what’s wrong with them?” It should be “what was normal where they came from?”
That shift alone — that one pivot from judgment to curiosity — can open up conversations that actually move something. That can close distances instead of widen them.
Because at the end of the day, we all just products of the world we inherited. None of us chose where we started. None of us picked the blueprint.
But we can choose to understand that the other person didn’t pick theirs either.
And that? That’s where it begins.
Drop your thoughts in the comments. I want to hear from y’all — what did your “normal” look like growing up, and how has it shaped the way you see the world?
