Maria Collins.
“Ah, you must be planning on red-headed grandchildren,” said the photographer during our family photo shoot this past weekend. Looking at my red curly hair, he’s surprised that our daughter is blonde and our son has brown hair. My natural hair has absolutely no red color and I didn’t grow up as a red-head and most middle-aged women color their hair so it always surprises me when people assume things about me and my identity because of a small part of my appearance. When my daughter was born, a nurse gave me a special dosage of medicine in my IV because supposedly “redheads bleed more”. People tell me they hold a special place in their hearts for red-heads – including me – because of someone they loved with red hair. Casual comments like the photographer’s or the nurse’s are so commonplace that I finally stopped bothering to correct people by clarifying that I don’t genetically have red hair. Add in pale skin and a last name of Collins that I gained when I married my husband to the dyed red hair and people make all sorts of assumptions about my Irish heritage – which I also have none of.
If I can meet people almost every day who stereotype and make assumptions about my identity from something so minor as hair dye or my married surname, how much more must that happen to someone who looks completely different from the people they are around? With different skin pigment and hair texture? Eye, nose, and lip shape? We have to resist the urge to classify people by what we see. Appearances provide very little real information about who someone is.
