The Bar is Higher

by Jonathan Mena

How collective judgment shapes individual behavior

At a Fiesta supermarket one afternoon, I caught myself thinking something I didn’t like. A girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, stood in front of me at the checkout line. She had a cart that was mostly empty…a few items, nothing that suggested a big purchase. When her turn came, her parents suddenly appeared. Each of them had a cart filled to the brim. They cut in with her, as if it were planned all along. I felt irritation rise in me almost instantly, and before I could stop myself, a thought flashed through my mind: “This is why people don’t like us. You don’t see this kind of behavior at Target or Whole Foods.”

That thought didn’t come from nowhere. It came from years of quietly knowing that, as Hispanic people, the bar for us often feels higher. When one of us misbehaves, it’s never just one of us. It’s all of us. The actions of one person become a reflection of the group. I’ve seen it in myself and in others, this almost automatic instinct to police our own behavior, not because it’s right or wrong in itself, but because of how it might look.

A few weeks later, I was at the pool of a higher-end apartment complex with my family. It was a big space, ten pergolas, each with its own lounge area, plenty of room for everyone. We had a speaker going, music at a normal social volume, loud enough to enjoy, not enough to disrupt. Then a group of white families walked in. One of my relatives nudged the person controlling the music and said, “Turn it up. Let’s see if we can get them to leave. They don’t like us anyway.” I froze for a moment, because in that instant I saw the other side of the same coin.

Where I had once felt embarrassment and distance from my own people, that impulse to say, “Don’t give them a reason to judge us” she felt defiance, a need to say, “If they’re going to judge us anyway, let’s make it worth it.” Both reactions come from the same place: the knowledge that we’re being watched, measured, and rarely given the benefit of the doubt. Now, kind reader, you might be thinking, “Jonathan, you sound critical of your own people. Are you being racist toward your own kind?”

No. I don’t think so. What I’m doing is noticing something painful but real, that our actions are often judged collectively, not individually. The courtesy of individuality, the simple grace of being seen as one person, isn’t always extended to us. When a white man cuts in line, he’s just rude. When a Hispanic family does it, they’re “those people.” When one of us succeeds, we’re “the exception.” When one of us fails, we’re “what you’d expect.” It’s exhausting, carrying that invisible weight. It shapes how we act, how we talk, even how we dress in certain spaces. It makes you rehearse every gesture before you walk into a room, because you know you’re not just walking in as yourself—you’re walking in as a test case. And it’s not paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.

I’ve realized that sometimes we absorb the same prejudice we’re trying to escape. We internalize the world’s low expectations so deeply that we start enforcing them ourselves. We overcorrect. We critique our own people more harshly than others ever could, because we fear that their mistakes will confirm every stereotype we’ve worked to prove wrong. That’s not self-hate. It’s self-defense. But it’s still a prison. Because at the end of the day, both reactions, my quiet shame and my relative’s loud defiance, are built on the same belief: that we don’t have the freedom to just be.

I don’t want to live like that anymore. I don’t want my worth, or anyone else’s, to hinge on how politely we navigate a checkout line, or how quietly we exist in shared spaces. Maybe the goal isn’t to be perfect ambassadors of our culture. Maybe the goal is to be whole humans, flawed, proud, thoughtful, loud when we need to be, quiet when we want to be. The bar may still be higher for us, but maybe one day it won’t feel like a test, just a reminder to carry ourselves with dignity, not out of fear of how we’re seen, but because that’s who we are.

The courtesy of individuality should belong to everyone.

So, kind reader. Next time you catch yourself making a quiet judgment, of yourself, of someone who looks like you, or of someone who doesn’t. Pause. Ask where that thought came from. We can’t control the world’s assumptions, but we can refuse to feed them. That’s where change begins.