Originally published 2016-02-17.
The short film at the heart of this page is I Am NOT Black, You Are NOT White, a spoken-word video by the American poet and filmmaker Prince Ea. Its message fits in one line: the labels we put on each other, by colour, religion or birthplace, describe something about us but never the whole person. The video spread quickly after its release in early 2016, and it still works as a prompt for an honest question. How often do we let a first glance write the rest of the story?
Below you will find the video itself, a little about the man who made it, what genetics and psychology actually say about race and first impressions, and some practical ways to catch an assumption before it hardens into a judgement.
Watch the video
The piece is built like a poem rather than a lecture. Voices and faces from many backgrounds take turns, and the lines keep returning to the same idea: a label is something handed to you, often at birth, and it can quietly decide who you sit with, who you trust and who you fear. The film does not deny that people look different or come from different places. Its point is that those facts are the start of knowing someone, not the end.
When the video was shared on the site Collective Evolution, the writer added a personal memory. She had grown up in a small, mostly homogeneous town in northern British Columbia, then moved to Toronto and started work in a restaurant kitchen alongside Sri Lankan and Indian cooks. Her first thought was that she would struggle to remember their names and would have little in common with them. Getting to know them showed her how little that first impression had been worth. It is a small story, and that is exactly why it rings true: most prejudice is not dramatic hatred but a lazy shortcut nobody ever challenged.
Who is Prince Ea?
Prince Ea is the stage name of Richard Williams, born in 1988 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied anthropology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, which shows in his work: many of his videos ask how culture shapes the categories we take for granted. He began as a hip-hop artist and moved to motivational spoken-word films around 2014. His channel covers race, the environment, education, work-life balance and spirituality, and his videos have together been viewed more than a billion times.
He has said that texts such as the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita changed his outlook, and that influence is visible here. The video treats identity less as a fixed box and more as a set of stories we can examine, keep or put down.
What science says about race and shared humanity
The film's claim that "we are one" is poetic, but it lines up surprisingly well with modern genetics. Any two people on Earth are roughly 99.5 per cent genetically alike. Most human genetic variation, around 85 per cent by the classic estimate, exists within local populations rather than between them. In plain terms, two neighbours in the same town can differ genetically more than two strangers from different continents.
Visible traits such as skin colour are controlled by a small number of genes that responded to sunlight and climate over thousands of years. They tell you very little about the rest of a person's biology, and nothing about character, intelligence or values. That is why many geneticists describe race as a poor biological category, even though it remains a powerful social one. Scientists still debate how ancestry clusters should be described, but the broad picture is clear: there are no neat genetic boundaries that match the racial boxes on a form.
The social side matters, though. Race may be a weak biological idea, yet people's experiences of discrimination, housing, policing or job interviews are very real. Recognising shared humanity is not the same as pretending those differences in treatment do not exist.
Why we judge by appearance so quickly
Human brains sort the world into categories because it saves effort. Sorting a snake from a stick in a fraction of a second helped our ancestors survive. The same habit applied to people produces stereotypes: quick guesses about a stranger based on the group we think they belong to.
Three things make those guesses stick:
- Familiarity. We tend to feel more comfortable with faces and accents we grew up around, which is exactly what the Toronto story describes.
- Repetition. News, films and jokes repeat the same images of certain groups until they feel like knowledge rather than opinion.
- Confirmation. Once we hold an expectation, we notice the examples that fit it and forget the ones that do not.
None of this makes a person bad. It does mean that good intentions alone are not enough; we have to notice the shortcut before we can choose not to take it.
The research on getting to know each other
The most hopeful part of the story is backed by decades of study. In 1954 the psychologist Gordon Allport published The Nature of Prejudice and proposed what became known as the contact hypothesis: prejudice tends to shrink when people from different groups actually spend time together. He argued it works best when four conditions are present: equal status, shared goals, cooperation rather than competition, and support from the surrounding institutions.
A restaurant kitchen ticks most of those boxes, which may be why the writer's attitude changed so fast. In 2006 the researchers Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp pooled 515 studies and found that face-to-face contact was generally linked to lower prejudice, with stronger effects when Allport's conditions were met.
The research is honest about its limits. Some people who already hold fewer prejudices seek out more contact, which can inflate the results. Hostile or competitive encounters can make attitudes worse, not better. Contact is not magic, but cooperative, everyday contact between equals is one of the best-supported tools we have.
Common misunderstandings about the message
"So we should ignore race." Not quite. A colour-blind approach can sound kind, yet it can also make it harder to talk about real unfairness. The healthier reading of the video is to see the label and then look past it, rather than to pretend it is invisible.
"Culture doesn't matter." The film is not asking anyone to give up a language, faith or family tradition. Those are part of who people are. The problem it targets is using those features to decide in advance what someone is worth or what they will do.
"Labels cause every war." Labels are used to justify conflict, but wars also grow from disputes over land, power, resources and history. Dividing people into "us" and "them" makes those conflicts easier to start and harder to end, which is reason enough to question it.
Small ways to look beyond the label
- Name the assumption. When you catch yourself guessing what someone is like, say the guess to yourself in words. Spoken out loud, many assumptions sound thinner than they felt.
- Ask a real question. Where did you grow up? What are you working on? What is the best meal you have ever had? Curiosity replaces a story you invented with the one they actually live.
- Share a task. Cooking, volunteering, playing on a team or working on a project together builds the kind of contact the research supports.
- Widen your feed. Follow writers, artists and creators whose lives look different from yours, and notice how quickly "different" becomes familiar.
- Keep both truths in view. People share the same basic needs for safety, respect and belonging, and they also carry different histories. Seeing both is what makes the other person whole.
Prince Ea's film lasts only a few minutes, but the habit it asks for takes a lifetime: meeting each person as a person first. What first impression have you had to rethink after getting to know someone? Share it in the comments.
Sources: Video by Prince Ea on YouTube; original post and personal story via Collective Evolution; Wikipedia: Prince Ea; Wikipedia: Human genetic variation; Wikipedia: Contact hypothesis.
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