Sherman Alexie's Flight Patterns

Living in hard conditions, can make the person understand the world better. Being disabled, can create from the person a novelist. Hearing another stories, can help the person to live satisfy. Learning history, can teach the person to be unjudged. Embodiment the author to his real experience in some of his stories, consider as the most tentacles talk that can touch reader's heart. Because he lived, heard, learned, embodied, and according to all of his written, Sherman Alexie classified as the most successful writer who his words represent the reality. The story “Flight Patterns,” which was written by Sherman Alexie was representing some perspectives from his own life, like being Native American, and person with disability. The story also was about the severe problems people in this world have with profiling. It doesn’t matter if you’re White, Black, Indian, Spanish, Muslim, Jewish, rich, or even poor everyone does it. The two character I would like to focus on in this story is called William and Fekadu.

The short story “Flight Patterns,” shows its readers how every race of humans' stereotype on each other (racial profiling). In social psychology, a stereotype is a thought that can be adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things. These thoughts or beliefs may or may not accurately reflect reality.
“Flight Patterns” focuses on the nonwhite individual and the preconceptions of skin color in American society. More specifically, the story is a glimpse of the minority voice on contemporary issues such as what it means to be an Indian and what it means to be a minority American, particularly after 9/11.
William was the main character in the story “Flight Patterns,” he was of Indian descent who suffer from this stereotype in a specific historical event and many people still until these days suffering from it. William was married to his wife who he loved dearly named Marie, and had a baby daughter named Grace. William’s attributes were described as a small dark Indian male, who had a ponytail and braids. He was a very well-groomed man who loved his job as a salesman. There are many ways Alexie, the author shows his readers William’s variety of controllable disorders. The readers may gather that William is extremely paranoid. He is a fearful man. William is an over achiever in many aspects of his life, especially work. He is highly concerned with his health or lack thereof, depending on how much sleep he gets. “…he always slept poorly-and wondered again if his insomnia was a physical or a mental condition” (52).
William has experienced, he does not want to be offensive towards others by doing the exact same thing that is done to him and that he wishes for people to do the same (53).When people are profiled, the normalities that other people expect them to be a part of are—more likely than not—much further from the truth. As Fekadu is telling William that in England he studied physics at Oxford, William suspects whether Fekadu is lying or not because no one could ever think of an Oxford man turning out to be a taxi cab driver (56). When Fekadu realizes this, he states, “Aha, you do think I’m lying. You ask yourself questions about me. How could a physicist drive a taxi? Well, in the United Sates, I am a cabdriver, but in Ethiopia, I was a jet-fighter pilot,” which demonstrates that there is always more than meets the eye with people (56).
Every day, people unnoticeably profile others, whether it is someone off the street or someone they see every day.

When William first got into the taxi cab, he disregarded the cabdriver, Fekadu, but then when William actually studied his features, William thought of him as being "a black man with a violent history” because of the scar of the back of his neck (55). Even though William knew nothing about this man or the truth behind the scar on his neck, William stereotyped him like another person would: an African American who lives a malicious life.

To conclude, Sharman Alexi in his short story “Flight Patterns,” focuses in how much history is repeating itself again and again and again in every single historical event. It shows us an implied main idea about solid stereotypes in every era. It gives the readers an understanding to the conversation that happened between William and the taxi driver, and what happened between them is a real situation that going on every

day.