The very existence of this comic points to a sad reality. Is it exaggerated? Probably. But it’s a damn cartoon, it’s supposed to be.
Agreed. But I wonder if this is butting up against a limitation of the human brain. Every person across the globe experiences stereotypes. It seems to be a natural way the human brain forms initial judgements. Hell, I don’t think the comic artist realized they were making a stereotype when they made all the questions askers white.
Being aware of it helps but the best fix is to have a significant amount of personal time with the group in question. This is why it’s so frustrating for someone of a particular race to hear questions like this, because they have plenty of first hand experience with members of their race. Themselves, their family, etc…
But realistically a person can’t spend significant amounts of time with members of every discreet group of people they might see on a daily basis.
Sadly, statistics sort of tend to back up at least a few of those claims, even if it is a silly cartoon. Even if people do not like to admit it. Example, in 2018, 69% of black mothers are single mothers. But people never want to speak about reality because they have been told that speaking about reality is somehow racist, which is not. No problem ever gets fixed if people refuse to look at it, honestly.
“In 2011, 72% of black babies were born to unmarried mothers,[5][6] while the 2018 National Vital Statistics Report provides a figure of 69.4 percent for this condition.” The stats have not gotten better since then.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_structure
I’m not sure but I don’t think the point is statistics. I think the point is to treat everyone equally despite the colour of their skin until you know them personally, and their situation.
Around half of the US population has hypertension.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t want your doctor just assuming you have it and start treating it though.
The reason why stereotypes are bad is because even if there’s aggregate data trends on a broad population basis, that doesn’t necessarily translate to individualized specifics.
Statistically, black math scores are worse than white.
In my high school, I was in Calculus BC in my senior year, along with most of the other smartest kids in my grade.
One of the few black students at my prep school had been in that class in his junior year and for his senior year just sat one on one with the math teacher because he was a full year ahead of us. He was also the student that I used to get the most competitive with playing chess in the student lounge (because he was legit better than me and the few victories I’d eek out were actual accomplishments), and was the one of my friends to go off to Stanford.
It’d be a real shame if someone looking at him decided that based on broad statistics relating to the melanin in his skin that he wasn’t as good at math as someone with less melanin.
And personally, I’d think anyone making that leap of logic was a goddamn moron.
(Also, pro tip - it’s worth thinking about the differences between averages and distributions around those averages if you are going to make an argument for there being merit in extrapolating from statistics. For example, you are more likely to be told by a mother with a child that the father is not in the picture by a white mother than a black mother if you ask the question of every mother you see.)
Around half of the US population has hypertension.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t want your doctor just assuming you have it and start treating it though.
I have to disagree with a reply to this before me because I think this example doesn’t do the comment about statistics mentioned above justice.
You don’t want your doctor to treat you for hypertension, but you want him to check you for it to catch it early if you have it if you fall into a category that makes it more likely you have hypertension. This does not mean he should ignore the possibility of a disease in a non-high-risk group either.
Equally, black students being statistically speaking worse at math does not mean you should look at a black student and assume he is bad in math. But it can mean that funding for programs targeted at helping minority students going to math tutoring can be better justified.
I will not argue that based on statistics you should make assumptions about people, hell no. This is obviously racist. But assuming statistics (and being aware of them) are first and foremost racist would just be equally wrong.
The phrasings in the meme can be described as racist. But the structural problems that racism created and that lead to these assumptions cannot be fought by ignoring them.
Snowflakes in these comments hurt when someone’s lived experience is pointed out when it’s not even saying they’re the ones being racist. Same people who get upset at fast food workers getting higher wages as if that has any direct impact on them (other than the whole getting our economy and society into a better place).
First question in the interview I had a few years ago: “Do you have a green card?”
I was born here asshole. I’m brown skinned.
I’m not brown but I was once mistaken for Mexican immigrant. The way the person treated me in that instance was really eye opening to me for how folks can get treated that I never otherwise would’ve have experienced.
Exactly, and for any white people in the comments about to say “well they have to ask everyone to know you can legally work,I get asked about my citizenship status too in the job interviews, it’s just a box HR has to tick”
Yes, it is just a box HR has to tick, which is why they will usually ask after a few other questions, and in my pasty pale experience, they ask me “and just confirming you’re legally eligible to work in [country], are you a citizen… Or a PR” and the trail off, they don’t ask about working visas or our equivalent of green cards, they assume I’m going to say “yes, citizen” and move on.
Meanwhile my partner, who is also white, but from his accent he is clearly not “from here” will also get similar treatment, they wait until a few questions into the interview, they ask about his legal work eligibility, they will mention working visas in the question, but it’s still coming from a place of genuine information gathering.
My brown cousins on the other hand? “do you have a work visa?” is one of the first questions they get asked. Not even “do you have the legal right to work here? Like a Work visa or citizenship”, just straight up “do you have a work visa?” because the assumption is that they are not a citizen or PR because of their skin colour.
If a white person applied for a job in China or India, they’d ask that too. Stop assuming everything is racism.
It is racist for that to happen either direction.
“China and India are prejudiced based on race, why do we keep calling prejudice based on race here racist?! Checkmate feminazis!” 🤣
Yeah it’s not. It’s normal to ask that question because white people generally don’t come from there. It’s not that deep.
Lol I’ve seen this first hand so many times. “When did you come to Canada? Is this your first winter? Have you seen snow before? Was it hard learning English?” Like, do you think Canada just recently opened its borders and everyone who isn’t white must be new?
What I hate is that some folks I know who aren’t white have come to expect this kind of thing. Knew a great guy at work of Indian descent, got to meet him in person for the first time and I asked him where he was from. Normal question when you personally are an army brat and pinged around the country in your formative years.The response was “Well my grandparents are from India”.
I have never cringed so hard, and was quick to say “Shit, no, I meant did you grow up in Toronto, or did you used to live in some other place in Canada before?”. Made me think about how many people did that “No, where are you really from” shit with him before.
Back in the 80s one of my first jobs out of university was working downtown Toronto. One of my coworkers was this effervescent woman of Japanese-Canadian descent.
She would talk about what it was like meeting guys in clubs.
“So, where are you from?”
“Scarborough”
“Uh… no, I mean where are you originally from?”
(feigning an “oh I getcha now” moment) “Ohh okay, yeah… Saskatchewan”, since that’s where she really was from, previously.
Ok, all that aside, that third chick asking about college— what does that shirt mean…? No clothes hangers? Is that an abortion statement or does she just like folded clothes over hung ones?
ITT: Virtue signalling.
These are all wildly inappropriate questions to ask a random stranger without some prior explicit context between the people.
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Are you surprised when a good meaning person asks when a slightly chubby woman is due, when she isn’t actually pregnant?
Actually, yes, because that’s been widely known as a risky question to ask for so long it would surprise me. Then I would question them actually being a well-meaning person.
For fun.
My sister was standing outside a gas station with a close friend of hers. Her friend was enjoying a cigarette when an old man walked up to her and said, “You know, you aught to give that baby a chance!”
She was not pregnant. That was the moment that turned her around and made her go on a diet though, poor thing.
My sister said she cried for days.
Lol, if it got her to diet then it’s working and doing some good somehow 😂.
It’s funny how the people writing comics like these don’t see that they are perpetuating a stereotype themselves.
Now I’m worried that I’m blind to that stereotype, too. Care to elaborate?
Now IM NOT SAYING I AGREE OR THAT THIS BIAS DOESNT EXIST but I think that what they are getting at is that pointing out the stereotyping you do perpetuate it to a degree. Sort of a flip side to how sometimes people just assume that every black person has experienced overt aggressive racism or every gay person has had a huge coming out moment where they had to “break it” to their parents.
Like if I was jewish and I made a joke about how cheap I am and someone at work didnt get the joke because they had never heard the “covetous jew” stereotype. So then I’d have to explain it to them and put that knowledge into their head.
Like if I was jewish and I made a joke about how cheap I am and someone at work didnt get the joke because they had never heard the “covetous jew” stereotype.
Oof, I accidentally used the phase “gyped” at work because sadly that word is still stuck in my lexicon and I immediately caught myself as soon as the word left my lips and backtracked to fix my sentence to “ripped off”. My co-worker, who’s father is Romani, looked confused and told me “I know what gyped means” to which I said “I know, I’m sorry” and after a bit of back and forward - me thinking I had offended my co-worker with a racial slur, my co-worker feeling mostly confused and condescended to, as to why I backtracked on my sentence to replace it with a synonym… Turns out my co-worker had no idea that the term “gyped” comes from gypsy and is rooted in racial stereotypes.
She’s always openly and proudly self identifed as a gypsy, and the whole time I was thinking “fuck yeah, reclaim that phrase!” the same way I proudly identify as queer despite it being used as a slurr against me when I was younger.
But no, turns out she genuinely had no idea that in our country, gypsy is a slur, because her experience within her community and the places she’s lived were totally different, it was an innocent term to her.
It blew my mind that an almost 80 year old Romani woman had been hearing people throw racial slurs at her for 40 years in this country, and she was fine with it because that word had no weight as a slurr for her… But now it does, because I told her that most of the time, here, it’s a slur.
Not dissimilar from when my British partner met my friends and they’re all joking about who’s the woggiest wog and the fobbiest fob, and my partner is sitting there horrified because in the UK wog and fob are slurs, but in Australia they’re self used labels of pride, and I had to make a mental note to remove that from my vocabulary if I’m outside Aus because otherwise I would have found myself walking around England offending people by complete accident.
White people are all racist would be one stereotype shown here but there’s a few
Or maybe the comic is just showing common racist comments commonly said by some white people and isn’t saying that all white people are racist.
That’s a racial generalisation…otherwise known as racism.
The thing they’re complaining about in the comic…
Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
But it is true that these kinds of unintentionally racist differences in commentary are often done by white people. Not all white people but a large enough subsection of that population to become a general problem.
That’s what the comic is pointing out.
Too many people are wildly overanalyzing this comic or getting needlessly insulted by it. I think your interpretation is the correct one.
Casual, unintentional racism is more of a problem than people generally realize, because they’re not even conscious of it. Racism doesn’t always show itself in overt acts of hatred or discrimination. Sometimes, a well-meaning person can say or do hurtful, insulting things because of racist assumptions they don’t know they’re making.
It’s the same way with sexism. It’s not always blatant “wOmAn bAd”
I’d go to a mechanic with my ex to get her car worked on and everyone only wants to talk to me. I’ve worked food service where our cashier was a woman and people would deliberately only talk to me. I had a pipe burst at my roommates house but because I’m the man the water service guy only wanted to talk to me.
That last one fucked with me the most cause I’m like “dude, this isn’t my house”
Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist. Surely that’s less racist than acknowledging the truth!
We must all be missing the “All white people are like this” sign you must’ve found in the comic 🤪
(Technically aren’t half the white people in the comic not actually being racist?)
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I think I get what you’re saying. If we don’t talk about things, it ceases to be part of our culture. Reminds me of something Morgan Freeman said:
“Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man,” Freeman says to Wallace. “And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You wouldn’t say, ‘Well, I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.’ You know what I’m sayin’?”
I don’t know if it’s practical in a world culture of billions of people, but I understand the thought process.
That view feels overly romanticised to me, tbh; the idea that the way to stop racism is to just not acknowledge it. That not drawing attention to things will just make it go away.
There’s a lot of institutionalised racism in many countries, either due to racism itself or as a knock on effect from other failed systems.
And, of course, there’s just plain bigotry that is passed patent to child and from social group to social group. That’s not going to stop by just censoring media.
The message of this comic is, basically, “here’s some unconscious biases you could be making”. Reading it as “this is how you’re supposed to talk to black people” is… Well, if that’s the reading you make, then whether the comic exists or not isn’t going to change anything.
It feels like this sort of thing makes people feel uncomfortable and they try to justify the removal of the media rather than grappling with the concept of privilege (which, tbf, is hard for people to do).
You got it. Racism is treating people differently based on race.
The only way to end it is to stop drawing on differences.
And this is exactly the message of the comic. Yet you disagree with the comic…
I dislike racism its true.
Then what’s your problem with the comic?
You got it.
We can’t beat racism by continually pointing out racial differences. This is just more racism and isn’t helpful.
Sure but that’s not what the comic is about.
The comic is pointing out casual racism in how the question asked to two women in the same position at the same age are asked vastly different questions based solely on their race.
Casual racism through generalisation you say? You really can’t see how that works both ways?
Hit a nerve, did they?
