A friend and I were talking the other day, and he mentioned that “European men” are such-and-such when it comes to negotiations (cheap, greedy; I forget exactlywhat). He meant Greeks, Italians, whoever.
His comment was one unlikely to get one into trouble.
Likewise, I lived in Japan for 8 years and understand how that culture differs. Heck, whole books are written about negotiating with the Japanese, and not all of the content is complimentary. In my personal experience, the Japanese are very passive-aggressive when it comes to negotiating, often reject a win-win proposition because some dude higher up in the org wants to get an additional useless concession, and are in general frustrating if not outright incompetent in their approach (but their approach is often quite effective against Westerners, who always try to feed the negotiations energy to move them along, whereas the Japanese are purposely starving them). I’ve also done some work with the Chinese, who, while very generous and kind to guests in their home, are often excessively price-oriented, demanding, and greedy when it comes to business negotiations.
The above comments are also unlikely to get one in trouble, since Asians are a different culture, etc. It’s funny, then, that making generalizations about African-Americans and Jews is so dangerous. Doing the one can get you labeled a racist, and the other an anti-Semite.
The origins of this danger are fairly obvious: slavery and Jim Crow and horrendous racism for blacks, and horrendous racism and outright genocide for Jews. There has never been a pogrom of Greeks or Irish in the US, so talking one way or another about them these days might make you look like an idiot if your comments are extreme, and you might even make some enemies if your listeners belong to those groups or love those who do. But you are unlikely to be thought a person of true prejudice, as such statements just don’t key easily into the Big Bad Categories.
I myself don’t believe prejudice is a good thing. That is, based on one’s experience or others’ statements about a group, expecting each and every member to match a pattern. A sophisticated person realizes that such a way of thinking is, morally and mathematically, not a good thing. I also think it is an ugly thing to hate or despise a large group of people, even if, on average, they demonstrate tendencies that one dislikes.
But it is similarly poor thinking to embrace the mental copout, “That’s just a generalization.” One can make many good and useful generalizations about the Japanese. In fact, one would be a fool not to use that information in doing business with them (while expecting, of course, many partial or complete exceptions to crop up along the way).
I for one have extremely poor Jewdar. Unless it’s obvious, a Jewish name won’t seem Jewish to me, and I can rarely tell by appearance. Further, almost all my eperiences with Jews have been positive. Once, however, I lived in a building with a gal who seemed to live up to every possible prejudice against her group: extremely Zionist, racist against African-Americans, taking a rather exclusive attitude toward gentiles, etc. (and she was not religious; it was her identity with the Jewish ethnic group that was very strong). I was surprised because I had thought that such attitudes were not real, were merely the what prejudiced people said existed. Of course, I understood then as now that such attitudes, if held by a substantial percentage in the first place, were held by merely a percentage and certainly not the majority. But it was interesting to see my reverse-prejuice (that is, politically correct attitudes) encounter friction with reality. (She was, I must say, overall a decent and very talented person. We got along quite well.)
In a similar vein, we non-minorities (what an obsolete word at this juncture, “minority”) are not supposed, it would seem, to notice any general tendencies among minorities, especially, God forbid, African-Americans. Because that’s–bah baaaahn–racism. But, as said above, it’s not racism to notice tendencies, even negative ones, that pertain to different cultures. Is there not a contradiction in here somewhere?
All of this doesn’t cause me much trouble or grief personally, since there really isn’t a group in this country that bothers me. Nor do I believe that race has much, if anything, to do with our inborn tendencies (intelligence, behavior, etc.–it’s cultural). I am, for the most part, naturally politically correct. But I also have a brain that won’t accept a thought policy (social demand on thought or behavior) without subjecting it to substantial analysis. There is no deep agenda here. I just noticed the contradiction and thought I’d see what our intelligent SDMB group thinks.