Let’s talk about the Baader Meinhoff phenomenon or the frequency illusion but first, I would like to set the context. Weeks ago, I wrote in black, more than a colour: what it is like being a black African woman away from the African continent, how people see your colour, never your heritage, and how that helps you develop empathy for the black people in that community to the point you begin to identify with them. You identify because people see your colour first and slowly you start to see like that too, so when you see black, you see kin. A few weeks after posting that piece, I read a story about a woman who was often the only woman on the teams she worked and how aware she had become of it. The post I had read had a tag along the lines of “take care of the onlys” which makes a case for being aware of the people who are different from everyone else in the room and that is when the frequency illusion took root in my mind.
The moment, I read ‘take care of the onlys’, I started noticing a lot of onlys. I suspect that everyone is an only in their own way but not everyone’s only is readily visible but I am very often the ‘only’ in rooms where my ‘only’ cannot be hidden. I am fortunate that I often am surrounded by people to whom it doesn’t matter that I am an only but it gets lonely. One time, I was the only black person on a flight. The gentleman who was seated next to me asked the attendant if there was capacity on the flight to move him. The flight was very empty and so the attendant moved him. I never figured if the man moved because I was black or because he just wanted to seat by himself. Being black means you never know but the attendant was my true hero because when she came to reseat the man, she asked if I wanted to move too. I suppose that is how you take care of the ‘only’. I wanted to share this story when I arrived at my destination, but I couldn’t because none of the people I was meeting had any context of this kind of micro-aggression (if at all that is what it was) so you must understand why I was excited to see more than one black person performing in the ballet few days later.
The frequency illusion suggests that a thing becomes apparent in your everyday life the moment you become aware of it. Recently, the frequency illusion has pushed me to discover a new phenomenon – The Other Mirror. The Other Mirror to me is seeing someone like you in spaces you enter. Looking at regular mirrors helps you admire your physical appearance and correct what needs correcting, be it clothing or make-up. The Other Mirror does the same thing but less superficially. To see a person like you in school or at work excelling or even failing gives a perspective on the possibilities for you either building your confidence to achieve or feeding your fear. The presence of these mirrors gives you multiple reference points (like many regular mirrors, if angled properly allow you to see your back). I think a lot of institutions try to actively create avenues to increase the mirrors in the room but do a terrible job at encouraging the mirrors to do the job of reflecting true identity.
