Stereotypes harm us all.
Good afternoon, i was recently sitting down with some people in a “focus group” and before be began to discuss the issue at hand we were all explaining a lttle about ourselves.
One lady was from South Africa, her heritage was a coloured one to use the afrikaans term, i would say an asian background.
Two men were the prerequisite white english fellow with their roots right here in the cold european soil.
One lady was from the phillipeans, she was a student nurse and very pleasant too!
there were two pakistani’s one male and one female.
Last but not least there was me, young gifted and black to coin the cliche, from my west indian background, or to the overly sensitive “english speaking caribbean”.
we had half and hour to go before we began our formal tasks, so we began to share and talk. we talked about this recession, moneym finances and any sign of improvement in the economy. By all accounts we were doing quite well until one of the persons above made a crushing faux pas…..
” well i’ve been out of work for 6 months now, and it would be alright back where you are from, nothing but sunshine, beaches, drinking and lazing around but i’m going to starve if i dont find work soon”
My blood pressure shot right up. i got an instant headache, i fought the immediate urge to thump this person. How could they feel comfortable enough to say that in front of people they had only just met.
This incident is not the point of this post but it got me to thinking about the state of our world and how stereotypes can negatively impact on people even when they seem positive. The person’s idea of “where you come from” seemed a virtual utopia if it existed i would go, but the point of the comment was the belittle, and diminish the livelyhoods and the work ethic of a whole nation/ ethnicity.
My favourite stereotype is the hypersexual black male. It applies to all black men, regardless of indivuality. It endows black men with a penis so large and powerful that it coined a phrase ” once you go black you won’t go back”. It bestows strength and a hyper-masculinity, agility and with it the “ideal” body lean, tall, muscular and hard. In short according to this stereotype black men are hot to the touch red hot sexual adonis’ with the sexual power to make women ( and some men) to lose all self control. Here’s the problem…. this stereotype does not allow for individuality, there is no mention of any intellect, the black man is rendered a sexual beast, with all the bodily trappings of humanity but ultimately no human faculties. I had a teacher when i was 17, she was plain teacher from the midlands, her husband was 6ft and probably about 20 stones he was obese. she was once saying to me that in a fight Any black man could and would knock out any white or asian man without ever breaking a sweat. I had to challenge her on that, my father was a slight 5ft 9 and only about 12 stones and i said “my father could never take your husband on in a fight he would be laid out he just wouldn’t have the power behind him” but my teacher was absolutely resolutely sure in the supremacy of the strong black male body.
My second favourite stereotype is the Shy muslim Pakistani woman. Of late the world has started to fetishise women of Asia but lately i have noticed that the religious element has crept into it all. This stereotype renders all pakistani muslim women , silent, shy , bashful, oppressed, humble and shamefaced. The stereotype is loaded with inuendo and imaginings of women whose bodies are fetishised by the fact that they are almost entirely covered. Well let me burst this bubble because it almost makes me weep with anger. whoever thinks that being either pakistani or muslim makes a woman silent or opressed is a moron. because whenever i hear those things come up, it is almost always men who say it and they say it in a way that makes me feel that women who are silent or being silenced are something to be coveted. As a woman who has many female friends who are pakistani’s and muslims, can i just say… they are as shy, as bashful, shamefaced,opressed and as humble as the rest as all womanhood. There is an increasing amount of men who see women from the desi community walking by in their nijab with only their eyes showing and try and read the eyes of the women for passion and imagine the breeze passing between hidden bare legs….. these men are perverts. the reason why some men claim desire for these women is to belittle women who they feel are in opposition to these; little more than mysogyny they construct a womanhood they feel is pure , silent, free from all the nagging other women do. the shyness is is opposite to the forthrite manner that most women have. they imagine it is a womanhood that stands in the shadows and is a drudge for her man. To finish i would just like to add pakistani women/ muslim women are women alike us all and to part them from humanity is beyond fetish, it’s evil, i do not want to brush away any oppression issues that the pakistani community may have vis-a vis honour killings but all communities have problems and the pakistani community are changing from within.
The stereotype i love best are those about black women, of course they are closest to my heart. they all contradict each other, so how they have survived so long i do not know but here lets talk about them. Sapphire, the black woman consummed by rage and anger, she is always shouting, she corals the world with her tongue.she drives all sane loving men away she is loud and vocal, she is physically strong, in short she is like a gorgon, an amazonian siren who cannibalises men with her incredible spirit. Then comes the mammy , fat mentally slow, reliants on others overly motherly and desexualised, this stereotype is a nuturer like the name the american mammy which i presume is the version of mummy the english word equivilent to mommy. then there is the jezebel the youthful, vigourous , wetly pouting jezebel. the stereotype is all sex and trades on the curviness that black women are famed for , the typical african hips that give black women their shapely behinds, the full hard bosoms the waists that appear unusually small in juxtaposition with large hips. this stereotype cannot get enough sex and would often “devour” men until the man was spent of all sexual energy this stereotype is the female partner to the hypersexualised black male. well these stereotypes are laughable because they all contradict each other, sapphires are gorgons spewing bile and hatred , while mammy’s are loving warm and fat, while jezebels are curvy sexual and desirable. these stereotypes were made up to demonise black women and make other races of womanhood look good. the ideal when most of these stereotypes were created was white womanhood, white womanhood was presumed to be silent, quiet and faithful, slim and loving to her husband. so casting black women as the opposite was not only giving white womanhood an opposite but making it seem better.
while writing and debunking the stereotypes, i could not help but notice how womanhood’s stereotypes expose the misogyny in our society, if a stereotype is “positive” the women are silent, or quiet or shamefaced. However if the stereotype is bad the woman is considered loud, or vocal, or confronatinal. so in essence this world has to tarvel a lot further than a few nice paper laws that say woman are equal in status to men when obviously we have many entrenced social norms.
Women have a right to a decision… not acording to some men.
http://field-negro.blogspot.com/2009/05/pro-life.html
(please read the above post at field negro before reading mine! ta!)
Hello, good day to you from England. I was rather bemused to see the anti abortionists protesting at the catholic university where President obama was being presented with an honourary degree. they were almost exclusively male. they held up a banner of a virgin mary with her halo shining out. Mary was the ideal, she was so young she did as she was told, she didn’t question, and she could be controlled, by the man around her( well i wouldn’t argue with the holy sprit but…). These men are a throwbacks to the age when women did not have that much enfranchisement, when you had to have your husbands permission to take a job or futher your education. They probably want a woman in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, cooking all day so when they get home they just glide into a chair eat and sleep (men had it sooooo good).
Let’s have some real talk now, Mary has a halo because you believe that she never had sex. well most women in a “spot of trouble” have had sex, or intercourse. Mary was a vessel used to deliver a male child, god promised her that there would be no trouble and he would provide. Most women (dammit all women) become pregnant through men’s seed. some men do not and refuse to provide for children.Our society would probably begrudge that woman raising a child on the benefits offered by the government, but these hicks would deny her the right to the decision.
Abortion is an emotive subject because we were all at some point fetal, in-utero and thus we may have been aborted. but these men will never be in the same situation as a woman, they will never have something grow inside of them and develop into a separate and completely different entity, men could , sometimes do run away from the situation unlikely that many women get that chance to abandon their children.
These men probably say, well have the baby but have it adopted, REALLY THAT OLD CHESNUT!!!! that old one still doing the rounds…… our social care homes /orphanages are overun and they are under resourced by a few hundred thousand pounds if not million. Each and every child in those “homes” needs love and families but what chances do they have… with the newly born being first choice for adoptive parents, there will always be those left behind without families and is that anymore desirable than evrything else. but hey if you get some kids that yound you can brainwash them all with agreeing with you.
these are probably the same men with the same conservative viewpoints, who moan about single mothers and their supposed moral incontinenece. but they would want to deny that woman the right to make a decision about her own fertility.
If you do not agree with abortion, dont have one, The catholic church have no currency with me. their leader is a 70- something year old virgin, with no idea of what a healthy adult relationship is, (here’s a clue nothing to do with young alter boys!!!) they have yet to appoint a senior figure who is female in sex they are living in a fashion that does not uphold or reflect their supposed family values. these priests and bishops leave their family units and become men who exist only for spriture.how can they possibly understand the troubles the average family man, who burns with passion but has to resist to save the sanctity of their marriages? these dried up men who for the past 60 years abused the children in their care world wide (america, ireland being the cases i know of)they elected a nazi to become their leader but they condemn women for making educated choices!!!
Not every woman will have an abortion, Nobody forces women to have abortions, but women do have the right to have it as an option.
I know jesus was jewish, why is that problem for others?
I was reflecting on the images i have seen over this holy season, Easter the very festival that makes me christian. Easter is the reason why i am not part of a jewish faith. I love and respect the old testement as much as i do the new.
I have seen so many aryan jesus depicted, jesus is always depicted hanging from the cross with a giant loin cloth, disguising his circumcision, when in all truth people were probably crucified nude. Nowhere is he depicted with his curly hair which is noted as being “like woodshaving”.
It does not matter in the grand scheme of things, but i think it will do a great deal to erase some of the anti semitic elements in some churches, who hold to the idea that jews killed christ (idiotic at best, deadly and racist at worst). You only have to look at the horrendous tirade that Mel (drunk as a skunk)Gibson made. The arguement that jewish people killed christ does not hold water, judas may have betrayed him but does one man hold responsibility for all men of their race? No one ever sugguested that italians are responsible for the flux that is the middle east; really by that flawed logic you could say they caused it because the romans expelled most of the jewish people from the holy land 90 or so years after the death of jesus. Nope not heard that one.
I have seen people depict mary and infant jesus in many different ways but i have never seen a mary who had the stereotypical jewish phenotype, not to say she should be wearing a yellow star or have exagggerated features but never have i seen a young mary and seen the looks of a woman who was born and bred in the middle east, who was racially(more importantly religiously) jewish. I have seen depictions of women who look like their entire genome belongs in scandinavia,the netherlands or northern europe.
It is not really the images that matter to people who have true faith, but i feel that christianity does have problems in relation to the jewish faith, we need to have more respect for people of the jewish faith and the jewish faith itself, they gave us the old testement, and in return for the past 2 millenia we have repayed them with pogroms, hatred, discrimination and forced conversions. we need to grow the fuck up! our religions are divergent but that does not mean that we have the right to pray for their conversion(just insulting), or to confront them with things we know to be offensive or dirty to them (if you do that, pig is the right name for you).As for the lies and mistruthes that their is a world wide network of jewish people ruling the world…..PAH!!! what a load of nonsense, sorry if there was a network of jewish people controlling the world tell me why isreal the jewish homeland is constantly at war internally or externally, people need a stable base to control things outside their domain, look at the british isles, in 10th century england was created 955ad. then it rapidly started it’s colonial conquest of wales and scotland and made a furtive grasp for ireland. whilst those nations were still grasped by internal conflict and eventually over the years they fell to the organised ( and contempt worthy) england. My point is if the idea wasn’t so powerful it would be laughable.
Can we all repeat after me “there is nothing wrong with acknowledging jesus was Jewish and if he were born today he would go to synagog, The jewish faith is just as sacred as my own ”
STD’s don’t happen to people like you or me…. do they?
Ok, it’s time that people in the developed world wised up. In the 1980’s we developed a binary paranoia, one about HIV/AIDS, it was one that insisted that it was everywhere, but at the same time only really a threat to the degenrate. The 1980’s were so so free and accepting as perhaps we remember them, they were times of extreme predjudice, especially to the LBGT community, they were commonly held to be degenrate, not different.
1990’s allowed us to become really really lax, medicines for HIV/AIDS were improving and the mortality rates were not so great as they were in the prior decade. People in the developed world began to see HIV/AIDS as something that happened to other people, groupie infested rockstars, smackheads,black africans, famine victims, sex workers and generally people who they do not know.
The media has played it part, we never see the faces of HIV/AIDS in the west the mediacted and visually fine victims they only show us the extreme, which distances the diease from our consciousness. It’s only ever a bad thing. People begin to think ” well it’s mainly an African/black/gay/poor/promiscious thing thus it will never touch me” that is the mindset of someone who is at high risk. that is the mindset of a person who will not think to use a condom. they think the diease resides only within certain people , and catagories. they are not likely to get a screening for STD’s thus they are likely to pass them on to more and more partners.
Now i like many other love sex, i do not advocate abstience because i just don’t believe it’s healthy, but practising unsafe sex is just as dangerous. Certain people watch the news and see thining black people in africa suffering and they use that image to isolate STD’s, they reason it’s something that will cause you to be emaciated immediately and give up the ghost and die, not the case, otherwise healthy people would not have sex with infected people, they would be able to see and thus avoid infection.
I remember in 2006/7 the small English seaside town of St Ives was found to be at the centre of a clustre outbreak of HIV/AIDS. the news reporters went into the town and interviewed the towns people. They all expressed shock, they did not expect it to be in a place like their town. They did not have any foreigners (shock horror, quelle suprise!) everyone was absolutely flabbergastered! this quintisentially English 100% white anglo-saxon place “with no foreigners” had been the epi-centre of an infection cluster of HIV/AIDS so big that that the media had been alerted to raise awareness and ask that people please be tested!
So my basic point is, never feel that you are too nice, or too middle class, too white, black, asian,hetrosexual, traditional,christian,jewish, muslim, hindu, buddist,rasta, or any other religious faith to be struck down…. we are all born of man and woman and have the same equipment, there is no man made catagory that will protect you if you are not using a condom.
Oh and by the way if you come across some person who has HIV/AIDS do not respond with ignorance, that person is still human, do not discriminate, there is the chance that they have not done anything to cause their ailment, you can be born with HIV/AIDS vaginal births with HIV/AIDS can be a transmission risk, brestfeeding with HIV/AIDS is also a transmission risk, some people were unwittingly infected by tainted blood transfusions in the 1980’s and early 90’s. So they may have come into this world and developed HIV/AIDS through no fault of their own. Even if they did Get HIV/AIDS and they should have know better (ie used condom, barrier methods, used clean needles) then still do not discriminate.
