Here’s what you do when someone tells you they’re from Alabama: that’s all you know, but immediately, you’re building out the whole person—how they vote, what they think about God, whether they own a gun, that kind of thing—and you didn’t even try to do it. It just sort of happened, and it felt like you were being perceptive, if anything.
That’s the problem.
Everyone already agrees that monolithic thinking is bad. I don’t need to convince anyone. But the agreement doesn’t seem to do anything, and I think the reason is that the experience of doing it, from inside, doesn’t feel like the thing everyone agrees is bad. It feels like understanding someone. And you can’t talk people out of something that feels like understanding.
You can tell them they’re wrong, and they might even believe you, but the next time they meet someone from Alabama or wherever, the composite will show up again, because the composite feels like knowing, and knowing feels good.
“We are not a monolith.” You hear this from basically everyone it gets applied to. Black Americans say it, Asian Americans say it, evangelicals say it, Muslims and Southerners and immigrants from everywhere say it, and it’s always true, and it just kind of slides off.
I used to think people weren’t listening. But the thing is, they are listening. They just don’t want to give up the feeling of already having the person figured out. That feeling is, I don’t know, comfortable? It’s the cognitive equivalent of muscle memory. Your brain already has the motion down, and thinking harder feels like unlearning how to walk.
There’s even brain research on this now. Researchers have a term for the ease of slotting someone into a category you already built: “processing fluency.” And the finding that keeps showing up is that fluent processing—the feeling of something clicking into place without effort—is what psychologists call “hedonically marked,” which just means your brain tags the shortcut as feeling good, the way it tags a lot of rewarding experiences as feeling good.
Your brain is paying you, basically, every time you take the shortcut, and it wants you to keep doing it.
The positive feeling researchers observe likely draws on some of the same reward mechanisms that respond to food and other pleasurable experiences, which is part of why the shortcut is so hard to refuse. And when someone doesn’t fit the category—the Alabama guy who runs a food co-op, the evangelical who supports family planning—your brain just gets annoyed.
The monolith isn’t really about ignorance. It’s more that being efficient and actually understanding someone feel exactly the same from the inside, and nobody’s brain is going to volunteer the difference.
And the difference between those two things is the difference between a map and the territory, except you can drive your whole life with the map taped over the windshield and never notice.
Your brain is paying you, basically, every time you take the shortcut, and it wants you to keep doing it.
Take the phrase “Asian American,” which goes back to 1968. Graduate student activists at Berkeley—Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee—came up with it so that disparate ethnic groups could push back against exclusion together. It was a solidarity thing. But that was a long time ago, and at this point the phrase mostly just makes it easier to not see the people inside it.
The “model minority” label takes a compliment and uses it as a lid, and underneath the lid are Hmong refugees and undocumented Filipino care workers and Bangladeshi cab drivers, communities whose daily realities share almost nothing with whatever composite your brain assembles as I write “Asian Americans tend to be…”
You finished that sentence In Pew's 2023 survey, about half of Asian American adults described themselves most often using their specific ethnic label rather than the pan-ethnic term. Which tells you something about how well the umbrella fits. in your head before I could stop you. Whatever you filled in, it showed up fast.
The same thing happens with “the Black community,” which is a phrase that asks you to hold nearly fifty million people in one hand, and also with “evangelicals” and also “the working class” and also “millennials.” They all do the same thing. You feel like you understand something, and the feeling is so smooth that you don’t notice what got left out, which is basically everything that was specific about the people.
And the problem is worse than that, I think. Because sometimes these labels aren’t just slapped on from the outside. Sometimes the people inside them choose the label, strategically, because it’s the only way to get heard.
Gayatri Spivak came up with a term for this. Sometimes marginalized groups present as a monolith because that’s the only shape power will engage with. A hundred separate voices get ignored. One loud collective voice sometimes gets heard. She called it strategic essentialism. It was supposed to be temporary, a tactic, and by 2008 she’d publicly walked it back because people kept using it to justify exactly the kind of lazy generalizing she’d built it to fight. Which is, I guess, what keeps happening. You build a tool for one thing and people use it for the opposite thing and there’s not a lot you can do about that.
But that’s essentialism chosen from the inside, as a strategy. What I find harder to deal with is when it gets imposed from the outside instead. A news segment that treats “Gen Z” or “immigrants” as a block with a single set of opinions is doing something similar to what Spivak described, except nobody in the group asked for it—it’s manufactured coherence, basically, and the thing it makes starts to feel real almost immediately. Like that’s just how the world is organized. And once someone experiences a category as just being how reality works, you can’t really argue them out of it. It’s not like they chose to believe it. It’s more like the floor they’re standing on. People don’t love it when you tell them the floor is wrong.
I don’t really know what you do about any of this. By the time you’d need to do something, the composite has already shown up, and the composite feels like knowledge. What are you supposed to do, argue with your own brain in the checkout line?
There’s a process psychologists call individuation that could help, though. It just means asking one more question before the composite takes over. Learning one actual thing about the actual person. Your brain will go on paying you to skip it regardless, and some days you’ll have the energy for that and some days you won’t.
But the question is still worth asking.
Because whether we act like it or not, we are not a monolith.