Quote:
Originally posted by adduncan
If offense is only noted and taken seriously for one ethnic group and not others, eventually you're going to give the appearance of a double standard, just like the examples given earlier. Either all stereotyping is offensive, or none of it is--that's the only way to get people to take it seriously.
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Adrienne, you know I love you, but I'm going to have to disagree with you here. In fact, I would go so far as to say the exact opposite.
If I wanted to, I could say that I'm hurt because, as a University of Wisconsin student, I'm stereotyped as a drunk party animal and that it's just as valid for me to be upset about that as it is for someone who's black to be upset about the way their race is stereotyped. And it's possible that I may be just as HURT about the stereotypes applied to me as they are about the stereotypes applied to them -- but that doesn't mean that my anger is equally VALID.
If we claim that all stereotyping is equally offensive, that's where I think we lose credibility, not gain it, because when we do that we're saying that the stereotype that all Southerners like sweet tea is as damaging as the stereotype that all fat people are lazy which is as damaging as the stereotype that all Asian-Americans are brilliant which is as damaging as the stereotype that all white people are racists. . . I could go on. What really matters is not the stereotypes themselves, but what happens as a result of those stereotypes. And these days, there are going to be a lot less "results" (discrimination, persecution) directed towards Irish-Americans than there are towards people of color in America. I think we can all agree that a St. Patrick's Day parade where everybody wears green and says "Kiss me, I'm Irish" and gets sloshed is (and SHOULD BE) less offensive than a parade where everyone dresses up in blackface, wears pimp/ho/thug outfits, listens to rap and speaks "ebonics" while eating fried chicken and watermelon.
(Not just to Adrienne now, but in general.) I think there's a problem that I see a lot of, especially on GC in regards to race issues: people either don't know how to or refuse to try and see things from other people's points of view. I know I can't speak for people of color because I'm not one, but when situations like this come up I do try to see things from there point of view. As a white American, yeah, I sometimes do think that people are overreacting when it comes to race issues. Then I look at it as if it was my culture and my race being discriminated against for hundreds of years and I can see things much more clearly. There's a big I'm-a-bigger-victim-than-you-are/I've-suffered-more-than-you-have/I've-overcome-more-than-you-have complex going around. It gets to the point where you have a white woman claiming that because she lost out on a job to an African-American once, she's been discriminated against just as much as all blacks have and has suffered just as much. I know there's no universal yardstick for discrimination (Losing Out on a Job Because of Your Race: 6.4, Called a Racial Epithet: 1.3; keep a running tally and the person with the highest count wins the America's Biggest Martyr award) but I think it's pretty clear that some races face more of it than others and that stereotyping is bound to be more hurtful because of that fact.
And on a solely GC-related note, I think you can see how racist some of the topics come off when most of the African-Americans who post here don't even touch race-related subjects outside of the NPHC forums anymore because the hostility is so overpowering. I think that speaks volumes about the way race topics are handled on GC.