To make the broader meta point, everyone’s a hypocrite on some level when it comes to stereotyping - myself included of course.
There is almost no one on any point of the political spectrum - from far left to far right and everyone in between - who rejects stereotyping of all kinds. It’s almost always selective pick and choose. People who vehemently reject Stereotypes A, B and C often fervently embrace Stereotypes X, Y and Z. It’s often, “You can’t paint my side with a broad-brush, but I can paint your side with a broad brush.”
(And yes, I know, someone’s going to joke that I’m stereotyping right now.)
What do you mean when you say that a person is “athletic”? One is what one does. A person may have the physique, strength and stamina of a so-called athlete but has no interest in being one. As a kid, I was tall, sturdy and strapping. I could have excelled in several team sports, like basketball and football, but I did not pursue either of them. I did like to run, however, and I was fast, too, but I was more into music and cerebral activities instead. What I am saying is, just because someone is athletic, they don’t have to be an athlete, necessarily. It has to do more with desire or passion for a certain activity.
That’s an interesting one - “inherent lateness” is one of those traits that just about every race and ethnicity on earth has been accused of, or proudly embraces:
See also: “___s always talk with their hands!” and “We don’t say ‘Did you eat yet?’, we say ‘Jeet jet?’”
The word “lateness” is highly prejudicial here, showing a lack of understanding of basic cultural norms. Suppose an Argentinian [or make it Brazilian, it’s not even a Hispanic thing], say, invites you to a party at 7 p.m. You arrive at 8:30, and you are the first or second person there. You are not “late”, because you were obviously never expected to show up at seven in the first place, God forbid “early”.
I’d heard that non-punctualness (by western standards) is a common feature of people who grew up in an environment where there was no strict by-the-clock daily schedule. For example, in the novel Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, one of the characters mentions that he personally had not seen a wristwatch before the Revolution, and the difficulties of getting former peasants to understand that they can’t take a nap while waiting for a batch of steel in a furnace to be finished.
This is true; and it’s one of the reasons why saying “Black people are more athletic because they’re overrepresented at the upper levels of some specific sports in the USA” is wrong. The second statement doesn’t support the first because there are other reasons than genetic ability for people of whatever color to have or not have desire or passion for those sports; and nobody’s going to get to the upper levels of those sports unless they have that desire and passion, to the point of being willing to use most of their time on that sport to the exclusion of other possibilities.
Well! After seeing the ensuing comments to my post about tardiness, it makes me realize all the more that it is not at all just a black thing, therefore an unfair stereotype in itself. It seems that people of all ethnicities are guilty of the same thing. It is an individual factor rather than one accredited to any one race or ethnic group. I think that fact then debunks all established stereotypes when we acknowledge that the designated culprits of a certain personality trait or preference are not the only ones guilty of it but can apply to anybody. I have said before, a person is what a person does, regardless of who or what they are. All Jews are not “good with money,” for example. I am not Jewish, but I am very good with money. All Italians don’t talk with their hands. I have cited many non-Italians using hand gestures while speaking. I could go on, but you get the picture. Human behavior is not exclusive to any particular group.
It’s partly an individual factor (timeblindness is a thing; so is having a seriously overloaded schedule) and partly a cultural factor (some societies even now go in a lot less for precise timekeeping than others; and in some societies it can even be rude to show up exactly on time for some types of occasions.) But it certainly has nothing to do with skin color.
I once wrote on the popular neighborhood networking app Nextdoor that strange people walking around your neighborhood wearing hoodies, especially at night, warrant extra scrutiny as to their intentions. I was summarily suspended.
What’s the “wearing hoodies” part have to do with it? Even if it’s reasonable to scrutinize strange people apparently walking around aimlessly in your neighborhood, especially at night, I don’t see why the scrutiny should be clothing-specific. Unless the hoodie has a logo saying “NEIGHBORHOOD BURGLARS” or something like that, of course.
I’m wearing a hoodie right now as I type this, and posing zero threat to anybody. I hope I’m not incurring any “extra scrutiny” due to this “fashion” choice. (“Fashion” in quotes because the hoodie in question is decidedly not fashionable.)
Sounds like maybe your app moderators inferred, not unreasonably, that you were trying to use “wearing hoodies” as a racially coded stereotype. If that isn’t what you were doing, then I don’t really see the point of mentioning the suspicious strangers’ clothing choices at all.
Yay, my time to shine. I knew being a bigot would come in handy.
Humans build social castes with hierarchies. In order to justify the hierarchies we also invent what are called ‘legitimizing myths’ which are narratives that explain why the inequality is natural, normal and good. Many times people will ascribe the root of the legitimizing myth to something that is above questioning or human morals. Things like religion, the market, tradition, the laws of nature, etc.
One term for it is social comparison theory.
For example in virtually all societies men dominate women. to justify this we create religious myths that justify misogyny. We also create narratives that women are more emotionally unstable due to their hormones that evolution designed them with.
Or the idea that slavery against black people needed to be justified. So we created myths that god wanted whites to overpower black people. Or that we were bringing christianity and civilization to them, saving them from an eternity in hell. Or that they were created by nature to not be cognitively able to function in a civilization without white oversight. The fact that we were stealing their resources and labor was just a coincidence of the fact that an all powerful god or the immutable laws of nature which cannot be questioned ordained that whites should have supremacy over blacks.
So we have social hierarchies, and we create mythologies to justify why the people on the top deserve better treatment than the people on the bottom.
The problem arises because sometimes, the people on the bottom actually do have issues and the myths can arise out of them.
Islamic nations are, on average, more oppressive and misogynistic than christian or secular nations.
Black people do commit more homicides per capita than whites.
Keep in mind this can go in either direction. White supremacists hate black people for being lazy and ignorant, but they hate ashkenazi jews for being wealthy, intelligent and powerful. If they see you as having less wealth and intelligence, they accuse you of being genetically inferior. If they see you as having more wealth and intelligence, they accuse you of being part of a global agenda to oppress and enslave humanity.
But again, the myths can be the opposite of true. Donald Trump accuses mexicans of being rapists while Donald Trump himself is a rapist. Trump’s followers say women are too stupid and emotionally unstable to lead when Trump is stupid and emotionally unstable.
Basically, its complex. Sometimes its people justifying the social hierarchy and looking for any example. And again, it doesn’t matter if they’re doing better than you (ashkenazi Jews) or worse than you (black people), they’ll still create myths to justify hating and mistreating you.
And they’ll ignore all the times the people higher on the social hierarchy engage in the same behavior. Laken Riley was sexually assaulted and killed by an immigrant. But as I said, Trump is a rapist too. The KKK was full of murderers and that was all fine. White men have been raping black women at thousands of times the rate that black men were raping white women. But when a black man rapes a white women, society has a conniption fit. They latch onto socially deviant behavior by people low in social status to justify mistreating them while ignoring those same behaviors by the dominant group.
Plus people on the left tend to want to overturn the social hierarchy, so they react badly if you criticize those low on the social hierarchy. But sometimes the criticisms are fair. As I said, muslim nations do have worse records on human rights, civil rights and women’s rights than non-muslim nations. Groups like Hamas are oppressive, backwards, brutal theocrats. But they can see that at justifying hate against those low on the social hierarchy and they react badly to that.
So to me its a mix of things. For one people want to justify the social inequality by looking for reasons why those on top deserve special treatment (they were chosen by a deity, they are smarter, they are harder workers) and why those on bottom deserve worse treatment (the deity chose it, the market chose it, nature chose it, etc). But again, as with Jews and black people, they can be viewed as inferior either because they are successful, or because they are not successful. Even with black people, when black people get ahead it causes white supremacists to be filled with rage. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 was motivated by white people who were angry that black people were doing better than them. Meanwhile white supremacists also say blacks need to be treated poorly because they are less intelligent, less successful and less competent than whites. You literally cannot win. If you do better, that means you need to be mistreated. If you do worse, you need to be mistreated. Obama winning the presidency caused a resurgence of white nationalism that led to Trump.
But there are some valid stereotypes. Like I said, black people do, per capita, commit more murders than whites. However blacks use drugs at the same rate as whites, but they get arrested 4x more because blacks are over-policed. Also men commit murder far more often than women, but nobody talks about that because men are viewed as superior to others. I think blacks commit (per capita) murder at rates about 3x higher than whites. But men commit murder about 10x more than women, and young people (age 13-26) commit murder something like 100x more than the elderly. But nobody talks about young people or men being inherently dangerous and needing oppressive government control. We don’t need to invent narratives to justify mistreating teenagers and men because they are more prone to violent crime because men and teenagers are not low on the social hierarchy. We don’t need to find ways to justify mistreating them. So their rates of homicide being 10-100x higher is ignored. But black people, with their 3x higher homicide rate, is a major talking point. And while Muslim nations do have more oppression in the current climate, the oppression they have was nothing compared to the atheist far east or the Christian areas of Europe and Russia in the 20th century.
Are they not also more likely to get charged with and convicted of murder because they’re over-policed, and because judges and juries may be more likely to think that they’re guilty?
Or many of those Christian areas in centuries before the 20th, when they wre much worse. Or officially atheist Stalinist USSR. The problem isn’t that they’re Muslim as opposed to Christian or atheist, or that wouldn’t be true.
Again – the facts, for those reasons and the reasons that you give in your own posts, don’t back the stereotypes. The stereotypes are often used to create the situation that leads to the facts. The causation is the other way around.
Yes, stating that Black people are over-represented in US prisons is a fact. I don’t have cites, but maybe it’s due to over-policing, maybe it’s due to centuries of discrimination, maybe it’s due to more poverty and fewer jobs in the Black community.
Stating that fact is not a bigoted stereotype in my opinion.
Stating that Black people are over-represented in US prisons because they are naturally more violent or have more criminal tendencies or whatever – that’s where it becomes a bigoted stereotype, without a nugget, as far as I know, of truth. Then, using that bigoted stereotype when you see a Black person jaywalking or whatever, and think, yes, they are more prone to law-breaking, there’s your limited and qualified agreement with a bigoted stereotype.
And yet the OP of this thread was complaining, as near as I can tell, that merely stating the fact would cause them, at least here, to be “mmediately shut down as a wholehearted supporter and propagandist of such a stereotype”. Which, for either this statement or the over-representation on USA basketball teams, has just plain not happened; in a thread now up to 158 posts.
What people would (I hope) get shut down for here would be claiming that stating the fact amounts to agreement with the stereotype. Since the fact doesn’t actually back the stereotype, as you say, that isn’t true.
Thomas Sowell is of the opinion that yes, inner-city blacks really are dominated by a criminal thug culture, or “black rednecks” as he famously put it. Which incidentally brings up the subject of “I’m an X myself, so I can dare admit the truth that outsiders aren’t permitted to”.
