That’s the wrong experiment. This is what the OP was talking about:
A - No surprise there, we all know The Jews run Hollywood.
B - Stop repeating that bigoted stereotype!
C - Hold on a second there, B. Jewish people are (statistically) over-represented in Hollywood relative to the overall population.
Thanks to C, we’re now going to focus on historical statistical minutia instead of A’s bigoted stereotype.
This is exactly what’s going on in the National Guard vis a vis law enforcement thread. We get a discussion about how many NG troops are MPs who are “trained police” instead of the fact our president is sending the military into a city via a (literal) trumped up emergency.
C - Hold on a second there, B. Jewish people are (statistically) over-represented in Hollywood relative to the overall population. That fact does back the stereotype; it’s the nugget of truth in the stereotype. However, that fact can be explained by . . .
Not only is the conversation going to be diverted into arguments about the explanations; but C is going to have started off by claiming that there’s truth in the stereotype. Which is probably the main thing A will remember of the conversation, whether or not B proceeds to hit the ceiling (which, if it happens, they may remember only as ‘you can’t mention an obvious fact without being attacked for it!’)
Sure, but what’s the alternative? Replying with “No, Jews are not statistically over-represented in Hollywood” will then lead to claims of “denying reality.”
It’s a triple trap:
acknowledge that Jews are overrepresented = possibly playing into the bigots’ hands
deny that Jews are overrepresented = bigots will then claim you are being deceptive
ignore it = then bigots win by virtue of them talking and you being silent
I mean, there are legit reasons for that question. If 99% of people in Hollywood were fundamentalist Muslims or Christians, it would have severe ramifications for society and the stuff that Hollywood makes.
(I’m not saying Jews, or any other religion, have anywhere close to that much influence. But religion does matter.)
4.) ‘While that’s true it doesn’t back the stereotype. Jews as a group aren’t controlling what you see in the movies, that’s nonsense.’ Follow with explanations if it looks like anybody’s listening.
But the “Jews run Hollywood” stereotype isn’t so much about religion as it is about ethnicity and culture. (The standard bigoted grumble is along the lines of “too many damn Weinsteins and Spielbergs!”, not “too many damn kosher-keeping synagogue-attenders!”)
Then mentioning how fundamentalist Muslims run Hollywood wouldn’t be a bigoted stereotype, would it? You can just stand up and say that fundamentalist Muslims do, in fact, run Hollywood, and back that shit up with facts.
The problem here is that Mr. C does NOT believe Jews run Hollywood*, he knows it’s a bigoted stereotype. Yet, he decides, without anyone asking, to “correct” someone by voicing his limited and qualified agreement with the stereotype.
*Well, maybe he does, and in addition to being a bigot, he’s a coward who won’t voice his actual agreement with the stereotype.
IIRC, the predominance of Ashkenazi Jews in early Hollywood was due to nepotism, or at least of senior executives hiring promising young men recommended by those closest to them. Almost exclusively Jewish but not exclusively a Jewish practice, because it also explains why WASPS ran Wall Street or Yalies the CIA.
We need to go back a bit. Contrary to @BigT, I believe the majority of stereotypes spring from some kind of observation, rather than being invented ex nihilo. And this observation might be accurate, or it might be unrepresentative or biased in some way (for example, based on media reporting that doesn’t reflect the true frequency of events). Humans are always looking for patterns, and we like to come up with explanations for those patterns: thus is a stereotype born. If the stereotypers have a pre-existing prejudice or hostility towards the group in question, it can easily be a bigoted stereotype.
Eg in the current example, the observation would be “there sure seem to be an awful lot of Jewish people doing important jobs in Hollywood”, and the stereotype (or conspiracy theory?) is that “the Jews run Hollywood”.
Then we can ask two questions: is the observation the stereotype is (presumably) based on accurate? And does it support the stereotype? The answer to the first question varies, and the answer to the second, in the case of bigoted stereotypes, is usually “no”.
I took the OP to be effectively asking how to say that the answer to the first question is “yes” without being accused of supporting or endorsing the stereotype. Perhaps I misunderstood?
Regardless, that’s my issue with the whole thing. It’s not that I want to frame some fact as supporting a stereotype, it’s that I want to be able to say the fact is true, if it is indeed true.
Perhaps you believe it should be enough to write “I’m not saying it supports stereotype Y, but ackshually, X is true”. However, this would almost certainly be interpreted as a dog whistle or as suspect by uncharitable posters. And perhaps this genuinely is what bigots say?
I think the actual answer to the OP is that you need to write an essay explaining why observation X does not support stereotype Y, and only then is it permissible to point out that X is true. And even so, people are likely to reflexively deny that X is true because they think it supports the stereotype.
This is why wise people follow the gentle advice of multiple posters here and keep their mouths shut.
This is funny because Republicans/conservatives/MAGA are forever complaining that liberals believe ‘oppressed’ groups have no agency, and white people/men/cishets etc are always blamed for their problems. And they also seem convinced they are an oppressed group themselves, so it actually fits.
But we can research the facts about the origins of at least some stereotypes - and the stereotypes about Black people in America very clearly originated not from any behavioral observations, but from a need to justify enslavement and (later) Jim Crow laws by those in power in the South (as well as Sundown Towns around the country).
IMO it’s about as accurate as your ‘the media thinks Republicans have no agency’ claim. And it’s pretty subjective, so I have no idea how we’d prove it one way or the other.
Look, if you guys want to agree with bigoted stereotypes then just do it. It’s not going to surprise anyone, trust me. You are only handicapping yourselves. If you think you need to speak truth to power about the real unPC difference between Black people and White people then just do it.
DemonTree, none of those cites you provided show any poster actually advocating the suppression of facts or refusing to acknowledge facts.
The point of Cheesesteak’s remarks (and I will defer to Cheesesteak’s more authoritative interpretation of them if he disagrees) about “shutting the fuck up” was about refraining from excusing or sanitizing a nasty bigot’s bullshit stereotype. Not about refusing to express or acknowledge any actual facts relevant to such stereotypes.
Yeah, this is a perennial problem with the discourse of self-identified “race realists” and similar discussions. Not trying to say that DemonTree herself is a race-realist type, but their sort of naive “it stands to reason” logic is very viscerally appealing when one’s arguing about very complicated matters.
The core of the problem, it seems to me, is that it’s easy to get confused about the difference between inconclusive evidence in favor of some hypothesis and unreliable evidence about that hypothesis.
For example, let’s say your hypothesis is that leafhoppers prefer variegated leaves to nonvariegated ones on their foodplants. Your experimental results seem to confirm that preference, but maybe your confidence interval is quite large, so the probability that the results are just a statistical fluctuation is quite high, and/or there are likely to be confounding factors you didn’t account for in how the variegated leaves were selected, or whatever. So, you do have some evidence in favor of your hypothesis, but it’s very far from a slam dunk. The evidence is inconclusive.
Now suppose that you suddenly found out that you have an unsuspected mild form of color vision deficiency that led you to make mistakes in the leaf selection for your experiment: some of your supposedly unvariegated leaves were actually variegated and vice versa. You don’t actually know what kind of leaves the leafhoppers were eating when you recorded them as preferring “V” or “NonV”. You messed up the experimental conditions, so you never actually tested what you thought you were testing, and your results are worthless. The evidence is unreliable.
This is what happens with many so-called “nuggets of truth” in phenomena affected by systemic societal bigotry. I used to get into arguments with “race realists” on these boards, for example, who insisted that persistent measured IQ differences between Black and non-Black test subjects counted as evidence that Black people are naturally less intelligent than non-Black ones. They were willing to admit that such evidence was inconclusive—that IQ testing is imperfect and that there can be all sorts of reasons for people to test differently, etc.—but they really really really wanted the acknowledgement that it counted as some evidence supporting their hypothesis.
What they couldn’t wrap their heads around is that it’s impossible to test subjects’ “natural” intelligence levels in an environment where some subjects have experienced lifelong stereotypes and bigotry about their alleged “lower intelligence”, and others haven’t. In such circumstances you are never getting an accurate reading of what their “natural” intelligence is, any more than you got an accurate reading of leafhopper leaf preferences in the experiment where you unwittingly mixed up the variegated and nonvariegated leaves. You have not managed to test what you thought you were testing. Your data isn’t just inconclusive, it’s unreliable.
That inconvenient reality is hard for a lot of the “stands to reason” arguers to process. It feels to them like just needless nitpicking and resistance to admitting unwelcome facts. “Look, I already admitted that this evidence is incomplete and inconclusive, so why aren’t you willing even to admit that it actually does count as some evidence supporting this position?!?” They haven’t grasped the difference between the inconclusive and the unreliable.
That sort of “go ahead, it doesn’t bother or affect us” approach sounds all fine and good except that these stereotypes command enormous power. They’re arguably a big reason Trump won in 2016 and 2024.
