Assumptions

During senior year of high school, I took a course called sports and entertainment marketing. The class was discussing homosexuality in sports. Denny Neagle, a former major league baseball pitcher, was one of the athletes discussed. A classmate asked if Neagle was homosexual because our teacher mentioned rumors about him. The teacher answered no. I contributed to the conversation by saying that I thought Neagle was homosexual as well. This is when the cultural-individual dialectic problem started.
My teacher asked why I believed that Neagle was homosexual. My response was he kissed Larry Walker, who was his teammate at the time on the lips in the dugout during a baseball game on television. The teacher then asked “Why does that mean he is homosexual?” I responded by telling him that he kissed a man who he was not related to on the lips. Then two of my classmates made facial expressions which made me feel ignorant. The teacher then went on to say “That’s not a good reason!” In the culture and environment that I grew up in, males barely hugged other males even if they were relatives, unless they had not seen them for years. Then I saw two men kiss on the lips, and wrongfully jumped to conclusions.
As I sat in the class watching the documentary on homosexuality in sports, I thought to myself “I know I am right!” After class was over, I thought “How could I be so off base and not consider how ignorant that was?” I never looked at Neagle’s biography to find out his sexual orientation, I just assumed. Maybe that was just his way of communicating affection towards a friend and a teammate. I had become the culprit of what I hate being the victim of; stereotyping someone from a different culture or race because he communicated differently.