Key Words: Judging thy neighbor.

I've had the cops called on me twice in the past year. It wasn't for making too much noise or even doing anything illegal.

No, the police were called out because I was smoking hookah with friends on my front porch.

For those of you who are unaware, hookah is a Middle Eastern water pipe used for smoking tobacco.

If you've ever seen Disney's Alice in Wonderland, it's the thing the caterpillar was smoking.

In recent years, hookah smoking had become a very popular trend especially among college students.

There are, for instance, no less than three places in Huntsville that sell either hookahs or the flavored molasses tobacco mix known as shisha that you smoke in hookahs.

Now my point in writing this is not to defend hookah smoking. I don't expect everyone to know about it.

My problem is that my neighbors, who didn't understand what I was doing, assumed the worst and decided to call the police.

Granted, I can understand why they did it. At first sight, I probably look like I was up to no good to the more socially conservative members of the Huntsville community.

I'm a bigger guy, I had a beard, and I have tattoos that cover my arms down to the wrist.

Of course they would assume I'm doing drugs.

Why wouldn't they? I look much more like a pothead than someone working on his second Master's degree.

This visual judging isn't limited to big tattooed guys smoking Middle Eastern water pipes.

I have a professor who is perhaps one of the most intelligent men I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Being an immigrant from China, he's experienced the same type of thing I have.

He recently told the class about how an elderly woman who checks him out at the grocery store repeatedly asks him if he works at a nail salon, no matter how many times he explains that he teaches at the university.

People form their first impressions of others within approximately the first eight seconds of meeting them.

Most of it is based on what people look like.

According to Framing Theory, once a person has established a first impression, they filter the rest of the information they gain about the person through it.

If the information they receive doesn't fit with their original perception, they will either twist it so it does, or reject the new information outright.

Understanding this, however, doesn't mean that it is acceptable.

In such a diverse society, this kind of judgment should be anathema.

We would truly benefit from recognizing other people are different from us, and that those differences make us stronger, not weaker.

And instead of assuming the worst about our neighbors, we might try actually talking to them.

Whether it's the Guantanamo Bay detainees or the Japanese internment camps, previous generations haven't been able to do this. We can do better.