Job Interview

(Last week)

"… I've lived in Bermuda, Canada, Barbados, Israel, Spain, Trinidad, Turkey and now Denmark."

"Really! How many languages do you speak?"

"Well, English is my native language, but I can also speak Danish and Turkish quite comfortably, I've forgotten a lot of Spanish and French, but I could probably get around okay with them, and I never really knew much Arabic and Hebrew, just enough to get a taxi home in Israel, and that was 10 years ago."

"That's really cool. You know, let me find someone here on Facebook. I have a friend who I used to work with a little bit, she's a lot like you."

"Oh really? Has she travelled a lot?"

"Not as far as I know."

"Does she speak Turkish as well?"

"No. I'm pretty sure of that. But I worked really well with her, so I know you and I can work well together."

"Is she also from Bermuda?"

"Nope. She was born and raised in England. Ah yes. Here she is!"

Looking at Facebook picture, puzzled "…um…?"

"See! She has brown eyes like you! I really liked her. Her eye colour was never an issue for me. The reason we don't work together now is because she is in Copenhagen and I am here."

"I see."

"I was hoping you could start on Monday. We have two students who are brown-eyed like you. It would be great for you to teach them since you have so much in common."

I found out during the course of more conversation that these two young girls are from a different country, in fact a region of the world which I have never visited. Their culture is just as different from mine as it is from my interviewer's. In fact, my interviewer and I have many more cultural similarities than I do with these girls. They are of a completely different religious background, both from the one I grew up with in my own society, and the one I am affiliated with. Their native language is one I also don't know anything about, in fact, I don't even know how to say 'hello' in their native tongue. How is that we have 'so much' in common? Ah yes, we happen to have the same eye colour. A superficial trait that we inherited from our parents, that has nothing to do with personality, culture, identity, world view, or pretty much anything else.

One could say that my interviewer has an inordinate preoccupation with eye colour. He seems to think that all brown-eyed people are the same. He appears to ignore actual important characteristics of people, and give far more importance to the colour of their eyes than who they are as individuals. Is there a name for that? Someone so preoccupied with the colour of a person's eyes that they use that instead of other known factors to decide what that person is like?

I should probably mention that where I have typed 'eye' you should read 'skin'.