Initiating conversations with not your usual culprit

Well this was a thought I had to help sort of reboot some parts of our brain, if you think about it from my perspective there are a lot of groups that I get in touch with less. With most of these culture/religious/race groups I have my own good and bad preconceived notions. Lets talk about someone Jew, to be honest till date I have had no interaction with a Jew and at the same time I don’t have a lot of stereotype either. I think of them as smart, religious individual, who are more likely to be nerdy. (Again, this is all stereotypes we have inbuilt where we don’t necessarily shed light on).

What I recently did with a similar group is talking to older white men. I took a chance and initiated a conversation on my way back in the train from Moda Center after a basketball game. I usually have this sort of fear of getting ignored or just having a dry conversation. But I knew this was someone I usually would not have a conversation with and that is exactly why I started it.

To my surprise, he not only was kind and wanted to have a good conversation he also seemed to show interest in knowing about my likes and dislikes.

I feel these out of expected conversations need to happen as it helps dissolve mental barriers that the society and us ourselves have built to alter our beliefs. I am not saying to force into your way into conversation everytime, but rather that all these should be taken as a chance to dissolve the barrier.
On this journey, you will come across people where instead of dissolving the barriers, re-enforce it with their actions, which I argue is just a bias in our head to look at the act and associate them to a group. Instead of understanding the actions in most cases vary individually.

My message from this is to go seek conversations with people you don’t usually converse with and you will realize regardless of how far someones belief or values are from you they are at the end of the day just a human like you.