As a big fan of citizen science, I have spent the past month conducting a very important experiment. While I am not quite as hardcore as the American virologist Jonas Salk, who injected the polio vaccine into himself and his family before large-scale trials, this scientific inquiry has involved some personal pain. You see, I have spent the last month trying to smile like Zohran Mamdani. This is not, as I have discovered, an easy feat.
Ever since the incoming mayor of New York became a household name, I’ve been intrigued by his perma-smile. His detractors call him a “jihadist”, and he smiles. He meets Donald Trump, and he smiles. Some Republican lawmakers launch a campaign to investigate his path to citizenship and deport him? He keeps on smiling. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him look angry.
Do his cheekbones permanently ache, I started to wonder? Did the wind change when he was grinning once, forcing his face into that position? And does smiling that much trick him into feeling happy despite the fact that the world is a raging dumpster fire?
There’s actually been much debate on that last point, conducted by people with rather better credentials than myself. Some studies say, yes, you can smile yourself happier, and others say you can’t. A more recent study suggested that yes, smiling can slightly improve mood. But only to a limited degree. You can’t, for example, smile yourself out of depression. If only.
I can’t say with certainty why Mamdani grins all the time but I suspect the reasons aren’t particularly uplifting. The thing is, not everyone is allowed to be angry. When you’re brown or black and growing up somewhere where you are a minority, you soon learn that your emotions are constantly policed. You learn that while white men’s anger is sometimes seen as righteous, your rage is always wrong. And you learn that you don’t even have to be angry for people to perceive you as such. According to research by the American Psychological Association, for example, prospective teachers appear more likely to misperceive black children as angry than white children. Racialised people have always been seen as more emotional and unstable. “Sullen peoples / Half devil and half child,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden.
There is also a gender rage gap. I’m not sure there is a woman on earth who hasn’t been instructed to “smile!” by some random man, who thinks the fairer sex should always be affable. Even Hillary Clinton was publicly told to smile by news host Joe Scarborough in 2016, after she’d won the Democratic primaries. And the pressure to be nice, to smile all the time, compounds when you are a woman of colour. Serena Williams has repeatedly battled the trope of the “Angry Black Woman”.
Repressing your rage all the time isn’t healthy – but it’s also true that joy can be an act of resistance. What interests me about Mamdani is how subversive his grin is. Many of his critics, I suspect, would like nothing more than to see him get angry. To see him lose control, get flustered, so they can point and say: “Look at this angry brown man. Look how scary he is.” They’re still saying all that, of course, but it doesn’t exactly land when he looks like a puppy dog.
Back to my science experiment. My month of constant grinning didn’t come easily because I’ve got a bit of a scowl when my mood is neutral, and can’t control my facial expressions in other circumstances. I’ve tried to keep my expression deliberately impassive in the past, but it just looks like I’m constipated. Once I got the hang of the perma-smile though, I did find it quite a useful way to stay composed in difficult circumstances. I’m obviously not being yelled at all the time like Mamdani is but I’ve been on a few panels about Gaza recently, where I’ve been asked outrageous questions by people who are strongly anti-Palestinian. “Channel Mamdani, channel Mamdani”, I thought to myself on those occasions and tried my hardest to smile nicely.
My scientific conclusion? The smiling did help lower my heart rate; it’s a good way to emotionally reset. But it also made my cheeks ache and resulted in some dreadful pictures of me. So while I’ve got the Mamdani grin in my back pocket for tough occasions, it’s back to my usual expression for now.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
