In a society where we judge people by how they look and speak, I often wonder what people think of me in their first impression. It seems people determine ethnicity by the color of your skin and shape of your face. Your accent also comes into play, if you have one. Your social status is usually determined by what you are wearing and how you carry yourself. Another factor is how you speak. Do you have a diverse and prodigious vocabulary? Perhaps your sentences are cluttered with profanity and slang. Apparently profanity and slang are not an issue if you are a comedian or a sailor, otherwise you might be mistaken for a lower class, uneducated person, but I digress.
I work in Commercial Real Estate sales. Social status is important in sales jobs. Don't walk into a Bentley dealership expecting to test drive the latest model wearing a timex watch and off brand clothes. Not to worry, they already determined you don't have the money for this car when you pulled up in your 2012 Hyundai Elantra.
When you combine ethnicity with social status you now enter the world of stereotypes. Without apology, I am about to use a classic stereotype here. An Asian man who drives a Lexus is automatically looked at as intelligent and educated. He probably speaks more than one language. It becomes a stereotype because most of the time the assumption of him being educated and smart is in fact true.
Fast forward to me, a middle age white guy wearing jeans and a polo shirt. I have a tan, no hair, and not much of an accent, with remnants of New England mixed with southerner at best. You may not ever know I have traveled the world quite a bit and am an avid fan of languages. I also lived in Puerto Rico for a few years and at one point was nearly fluent in Spanish.
Today, and for most of my life, I have lived in Florida which has a high population of Spanish speaking people. I can keep up with most conversations but I understand much more than I can speak.
Some restaurants I go to that are Spanish, I will speak and order in Spanish. It doesn't seem to be a surprise to the people that work there. Nobody turns around and looks at me like; "how the heck did he learn our language?"
The other day I was showing an office space to a Hispanic man. He was talking with his wife on speaker phone. All of a sudden he turned to me and said, "Excuse me for a second". I thought he was going to leave the room. Instead, he began to talk to his wife in Spanish, who had just moments before been speaking English with him.
As I listened to the conversation, which was still on speaker phone, she asked him how much the rent would be and what the deposit would be. He told her he would negotiate a price with me after they got off the phone. She then asked when it would be ready and he told her it looked ready to move in.
I considered my options at this point. Do I interject and tell them I can understand everything they are saying? Do I start speaking Spanish to him and answer her questions? Or do I just stand there and pretend I don't have any idea what this secret language is that they are speaking? After all, that is what they assumed about me. He looked at me and figured there is no way this guy knows Spanish.
It really made me wonder what his first impression was of me. Living in Florida, and being in an area of town where there is an even higher population of Hispanic people, what made him think I wouldn't speak Spanish? I decided to play dumb and just smile. After he hung up he began to ask all the questions I already knew he was going to ask. I already had my answers ready so I guess I looked more prepared and then he would have assumed I was at least smart about Real Estate. In the end he didn't rent the space. I should have known by his car. He drove an old classic Chevy Nova. For all my non-Spanish readers, in Spanish Nova translates to "no go".
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