Here are the common signs in American film and television that a character is an ethnic or racial stereotype. Any one of these might be innocent, but each is a red flag. In this post I use “ethnic” to mean someone who is not mainstream White American (or British), “white” for those who are.
- Fits a known stereotype – Asian martial arts expert, Muslim terrorist, Indian brave, black drug dealer, etc. But these are the easy cases because you already know the stereotype. For cases where you do not, read on:
- Ethnic sidekick – the character lives only for the white hero, has no life of his own. Tonto, Spock, every single Mammy character.
- Token – he is the only one of his race or ethnic group and he is not the hero.
- Helpless Darkies – everyone is ethnic except for the white hero and the white bad guys. You are watching a white saviour film where the purpose of ethnic others is to prove how good white people can be.
- Lacks moral complexity – compared to whites: either too good (God, judge, guru) or too evil (stock bad guy), not in between. Never a mix of good and evil, never torn about moral decisions. At one end you have Morgan Freeman playing God (Magical Negro stereotype), at the other end you have Evil Ethnics who kill for no reason. In “Daria” all the main white and Asian characters have clear faults, but the two black ones do not.
- Lacks an inner life – no thoughts or feelings of his own. On a television drama the dead giveaway is the lack of a love life or family life. But you have to compare this to the white characters with roughly the same number of lines – they might be just as bad. Freema Agyeman on “Law & Order: UK”, for example, seems to play a Noble But Boring Negro – she has no life outside of work – but then neither do the white characters! In “Doctor Who” she does have a love life, even if it is unrequited. Regina Taylor’s character in “I’ll Fly Away” does not have much of a love life, but her journal and family life makes her inner life plain.
- Fails the Bechdel Test for Race – the character only talks to whites or only talks about whites.
- Ethnic girls are easy – always a stereotype.
- Speaks otherized English – speaks broken English (That right, Kemo Sabe!), non-Standard English or with a Recognized Ethnic Accent (Yah man!). Because only white people can speak “perfect” English!
- Conspicuous Ethnic Characteristics – clothing, hairstyles, accent, slang, etc. Like Jamaicans wearing dreadlocks (even though in real life most do not). White viewers see this as just being true-to-life, because they think the stereotypes are true – because they see them over and over again in film and television. But a real-life ethnic is far more ordinary yet interesting than that – like the black characters on “The Cosby Show” or the Jewish ones on “Seinfeld”. Or, you know, like white main characters in general.
See also:
Reblogged this on oogenhand and commented:
Isn’t Liberalism all about saving “Helpless Darkies”?
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^^^^ Looks like even the right wing crazies are reblogging you!!!!
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Don’t forget the henpecked, unhip middle-class white guy who embarrassingly tries and fails to be socially relevant.
Also, this common representation of working class white people:
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^ tried to include this image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/MaterCars.jpg
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I’ve totally given up on Hollywood and TV shows, i don’t support them both in any way, shape or form.
I watch them in means, where my viewing, can’t be counted as there are no commercials or sponsors to be watched.
The white Media machine, will never take ethic people, seriously. Until then, i will continue to boycott it in my own way.
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This list seems to leave out upper class and WASPy stereotypes. I’m thinking of the Thurston Howell III/FDR East Coast blue blood thing (Dan Ackroyd did this well in Trading Places).
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I am guessing this is American based, so, from a non U.S person, I would say an important one is Southern, inbred, redneck hicks is another active stereotype.
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Another awesome post, Abagond. But I do have to disagree with using Freema Agyeman’s Doctor Who companion as an example of a character that has a life. Ank says it best (as she usually does) right here: http://www.ankhesen-mie.net/2010/01/underappreciated-actress-of-color-12.html
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How about one-dimensional rural American whites? Either hapless (Hee Haw), self-reliant but ignorant (Natty Bumpo), or outright violent (Deliverance).
Or similar stereotypes of urban white Americans also always related to the European ethnic extractions as well as social class?
The problem, I think, is that almost all storytelling whether in a print, graphic or animated medium and all theatrical performance is based on ethnic performance. Maybe life is based on ethnic performance not only when others are present or nearby, but even when they are not and never have been. Sometimes, you have to distinguish between what is malignant and what is simply the way of the world. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that while you might make the world better, you will never make it any different. Trying to make the world different, as opposed to merely better, leads to its own catalog of horrors.
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Sondis I agree I haven’t seen a movie in a year or two at the theaters I mostly just watch cartoons lol. All I see is the helpless darkie thing in movies and video games its annoying. I was playing far cry 3 and it was all about helpess darkies and a white savior saving the islanders. Another thing is in movies they show a white person mastering a skill that takes others years to master and they are always the chosen one in kung fu movies. Is that a pic of speedy gonzalez I remember playing that game on my brothers nitendo, I feel old now.
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^ Irksome, hmm I may have to steal that word lol
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mstoogood4yall
Oi, I definitely saw that bullshit going on with Far Cry 3. I heard somewhere the writers were claiming it’s “satire” of the whole Mighty Whitey plot, but it plays it far too straight and with too little self-awareness to have been written as satire.
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@ Tehnoun
Yeah and also the other stereotype I hated in that game was that the beautiful female leader of the warriors wanted him. And they showed her as being easy and sleeping with the guy.smh. They always gotta show an “exotic” woman being sexy and wanting to have the guys baby and their child being the leader of the people. They did that same thing in assassins creed 3, where the native American woman slept with that white guy then their son became the assassin and tried to save his people. it’s like they can’t show a beautiful woman of color with someone in her group, no they gotta show her as passing up the men in her group to be with a white man.
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@ futurodellanazione
I deleted your comment for using a racial slur.
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Pardon.
I’ll rephrase.
Hey, you clueless, privileged Caucasians!
Quit yammering about anti-White stereotypes. Have you no sense of history? Those are harmless. It’s the stereotypes against people of color that are so destructive. It’s just fine if White culture is debased, degraded and hatefully portrayed. Here. See? Harmless kid stuff.
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P.S. Skip ahead to the 3:00 mark.
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I hated the Will Smith film The Legend Of Bagger Vance. The magical negro stereotype.
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Looney Tunes is racist as hell. I always even as a kid that Speedy Gonzalez cartoon character was messed up. Tom & Jerry was messed up too. Mammy Two Shoes the maid.
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Mammy Two Shoes speaks in black vernacular. Is heavy set. Later she was replaced with a slender white female with an Irish brogue. I read that Mammy Two Shoes was inspired, by the Hattie McDaniel character of Mammy. I remember feeling kind of awkward and a little hurt that black people would be portrayed this way. It was very unflattering. I hate Gone With The Wind. Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly Mcqueen, always made me cringe a little.
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*Even as a kid the Speedy Gonzalez cartoon characters were messed up to me* Typos in previous comments.
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While reading this through I had a certain epiphany: many of these stereotypes are generated from white acts of evil filtered through the cultural funny mirror of rationalizations resulting in a distorted picture.
Eg.
Willing ethnic sidekick Slavery
Ethnic girls are easy Rape
Activities that were coerced are consented to in the stereotypical representations. I guess this is another means of lessening the sense of moral responsibility.
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@ Anonymike (@ futurodellanazione)
For the purposes of this post, white Southerners certainly count as stereotyped ethnics. The exaggerated Southern drawl, the redneck thing, etc. The hillbilly stereotype that futurodellanazione pointed out is part of this too. And it is malignant. If Jews were that stereotyped it would be called anti-Semitic.
Italian Americans are stereotyped ethnics too: The Godfather, The Sopranos, etc. Not sure how badly it affects them. At least in metropolitan New York there are enough Italian Americans so you know that few are like that, that it is just the movies. That might not be true elsewhere.
I disagree. This gets back to the mukokuseki thread. Good examples of blacks not presented as stereotyped ethnics: “The Cosby Show”, “Love & Basketball”, “American Violet” and Spike Lee films. Even some of Tyler Perry’s output. Blacks are presented as ordinary people. White people say “Cosby” was idealized, but it was no more idealized than, say, “The Brady Bunch”, than whites commonly are on television. So ethnic stereotyping is completely avoidable. After all, mainstream White Americans seem to have no trouble not presenting themselves as ethnic stereotypes.
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@ Awake BW
Martha Jones of “Doctor Who” will need a post of her own, or at least a good share of a Freema Agyeman post. There is certainly plenty to say. She is arguably somewhere between an Ethnic Sidekick and a Noble But Boring Negro, and there are certainly elements of those things in Martha Jones, but I think she was fleshed out enough, she was enough of a person in her own right and not a mere appendage to the Doctor, that she rose above stereotype. The Doctor did not go for her, true, but she was hardly asexual.
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@ Origin
Excellent point. That is because most stereotypes are based on white projection. Like how American Indians, victims of genocide, become “savages”.
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@ mary burrell
And they do not even show the most racist ones on American television, not since 1968.
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@ oogenhand
Yes, in the sense that Obama and other white liberals give lip service to it.
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Have you ever actually tried to create a credible story? I think you would have a hard time absent resort to the ethnic stereotype. The sociobiological basis I believe that it is inherent in the human mind that the human being create some kind organized social identity, and that even in the absence of an indetifiable “other” this still will occur. Spike Lee doesn’t use ethnic performance? Are you kidding or is that just some kind of joke?
Interesting in that is regard was Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam”. I noticed that none of the Italian chatacters were actually Italian. If that was not an argument in favor of the idea of individual behavior as inevitably ethnic performance, then what is it?
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@ Anonymike
I listed Spike Lee as an example of not presenting BLACKS as ethnic stereotypes, not Italian Americans.
I do not have to create a credible story: I have read TONS of stories where whites are not presented as ethnic stereotypes. And blacks too. So I know that ethnic stereotyping is B.S. Not just B.S., it is not even REALISTIC. Instead it is like a needle-scratch moment.
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Abagond: Before this argument goes too far, I want to note that the issue I am interested in is that of ethnic performance, which is not the same thing as stereotyping. Stereotype is the wrong term, although I doubt anyone could avoid that entirely either in creating a story.
A few years ago, I took an upper division course in the Nineteenth Century American novel. I told the instructor that I intended in my paper on the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to discuss Tom Sawyer’s efforts to free Jim within the context of Eldridge Cleaver’s theory of the omnipotent administrator. The instructor told me that bringing this in wouldn’t work in a paper, but it did. Started out by saying Cleaver’s provided “an entertaining spin” on the ingrained idea that the gentrified or middle class white male (of Anglo-Celtic extraction at that) inherently was the only person capable of management activity. Sawyer, of course, put everyone in jeopardy. Full title of the paper: “It’s my job, it’s what I do: male ethnic performance in ‘Huckleberry Finn'”.
As far as Spike Lee is concerned, you brought him up. I was merely point out that ethnic performance (not stereotyping, sorry) was part of his tool kit. How could it not be?
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Abagond, how is this like mukokuseki? Isn’t mukokuseki about not portraying stereotypical phenotypes?
Where do physical stereotypes fit into this? Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Will Smith have stereotypical black features. Should casting them as black people be considered racial stereotyping?
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@ Kiwi
Well put! Another thing about white stereotypes is that most representations of whites are not stereotypes. They are presented as individuals, people representing the full range of humanity.
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@ Anonymike
This post is about ethnic stereotypes. If you are going to talk about ethnic performance as something different then you need to tell us what you mean by that.
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@ Solesearch
Here I am generalizing mukokuseki to mean avoiding any sort of ethnic stereotyping.
Denzel, for example, will always look black in a photographic medium, but that does not mean he always has to play a stereotype. Most often he does not. So much so that in “Training Day” when he does play one the plot uses it as a surprise twist.
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White owned Hollywood and media are depressing – greatly depressing. It seems there will be a cold day in hell before they either recognize that POC, LGBTQ, Muslims and anyone else outside the “norm” are more than two dimensional or they will give more opportunities to those people to tell their own stories without the filtering and approval of white executives.
White viewers see this as just being true-to-life, because they think the stereotypes are true – because they see them over and over again in film and television.
There’s the irony. They rather believe stereotypes on the TV and movie screen over real people in real life! They would rather believe that black men are gangters according to movies, TV and the news before they believe that there are other kinds of black men out there who don’t follow the lifestyle. This is why we have ‘stop and frisk’, a growing prison population of blacks, the constant brutality and murders by police and why the high rate of intra-racial black crime and violence continues to be a non-issue in this country.
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An excellent example of the stereotyping and how difficult it makes for the white american audience to understand the complexity of humanbeings: the black man in Cleveland who was saving those girls with others. Just look how difficult it was fot the news media and everybody to see him just as a man. Suddenly there was a real life hero but he did not look or act like Tom Cruise at all, wow!
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@ Brothawolf
Right, the stuff that the WASPy upper class (Scipio Africanus’s example) and unhip middle-class white guys (Randy’s) do not have to deal with.
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After reading through this thread, I think a larger point is missed. Not all stereotypes are ethnic. A stereotype is just a cliche’, really, and cliches are universally derided as part and parcel of bad storytelling and bad writing. Our culture overall is so base, lazy and televisionized that the presence of stereotypes says as much about the quality of our intellectual life as it does our “pervasive racism.” In other words, stereotypes are as cheap and easy as they are “hateful.”
Why do they persist?
It isn’t as if intelligent people don’t recognize cliches when they see them; they do. But I think it requires training to be able to generate within oneself a level of outrage sufficient to satisfy a liberal/diversity zombie. So stereotypes get ignored, most of the time.
Also, stereotypes have some amount of truth in them. See below.
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Abagond: One of the points I am trying to make is that what is called a “stereotype” sometimes actually is ethnic performance. I’ll let you know, I am for one thing a very guy hard to get off message. For another thing, the idea of ethnic performance is literally as big as the world. I suggest that rather than start a coffeehouse-grade argument, you meditate on the idea. I don’t even remember how I got on your email list but I stay on it and always look at your posts for one thing because you are a person, not an aspiring news conglomerate. I would say you are a very good cultural critic. In other matters, pretty quirky and idiosyncratic. Or is that another stereotype albeit one on a higher and less bilious level than most?
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Abagond, in mukokuseki his appearance is the stereotype, which I believe goes to show how wrong it is. That’s all I’m saying.
However, I get your point as it pertains to this post.
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Spock as an ethnic sidekick? How does that work?
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I think it should be noted that futurodellanazione owns a white supremacist blog.
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Also futurodellanazione,
You uploading that video that was once on television and making that comment about how stereotypes having truth in them makes our case stronger.
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@Brothawolf calling that thing a blog is a compliment
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i got some type of ‘private video’ message from future’s news clip video
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@ Mike C
Like an Ethnic Sidekick the Spock of the 1960s is not white yet loyally serves the white hero above all else. He has no life apart from that. He has almost no love life. His family life is shown like once. His lack of feelings is so Ethnic Sidekick it is almost parody.
Aliens in the Star Trek of the 1960s function like ethnics – the same tropes are applied: they kill for no reason, their females are easy, they need a saviour, they can become Almost Human, like Spock, through loyalty and service to humans. Spock is even a Tragic Mulatto! You do not see the trope much now but it was common in America in the early to middle 1900s.
Star Trek in the 1960s even has the same four levels of human beings as Anglo-American racism: Real People (Kirk), Almost Real People (Spock), Fellow Human Beings (Red Shirts) and the Despised Other (Klingons):
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Reblogged this on The Racist and Unoriginal Anglo-American Entertainment Industry.
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[…] Here are the common signs in American film and television that a character is an ethnic or racial stereotype. Any one of these might be innocent, but each is a red flag. In this post I use "ethnic"… […]
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at least Speedy Gonzales was not a negative stereotype ’cause he always out smarts Sylvester. Maybe Jason Richwine never watched Speedy Gonzales.
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Abagond:
Italian Americans are stereotyped ethnics too: The Godfather, The Sopranos, etc. Not sure how badly it affects them.
It is true – even on the Simpsons, Fat Tony.
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Italian Americans are stereotyped ethnics too: The Godfather, The Sopranos, etc. Not sure how badly it affects them.
I remember group for Italian Americans (I don’t remember their name) protested against MTV’s reality show Jersey Shore when it first came out because they thought the roommates were stereotyping Italian Americans. I haven’t heard any protests regarding Mob Wives though.
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@With Love Glenn
Still, the Speedy Gonzales cartoons stereotyped Mexicans. Most of the Mexican mice, cats or any other animal would always be wearing sombreros, white shirts with white pants (if they wore any), poor and speak in a mock Mexican accent. I remember there were a couple of WB cartoons with two Mexican crows who also wore sombreros, but they were portrayed as lazy and stupid.
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Most of the characters that POC portray on TV portray stereotypical roles that brainwashes the public into believing the stereotypes about Black people. Thus I believe many of our Black actors and actresses are sellouts.
Queen Latifah and Oprah are Mammies
Beyoncé, Halle Berry and Kerry Washington are Jezebels
Naomi Campbell would fall into the Sapphire
These are the three stereotypical roles of Black women in this racist society of AmeriKKKlan that is used on television to brainwash the population into believing that Black women are less attractive and less worthy of love and acceptance. And I write this as a Black woman.
And when I watch shows on TV and when it has a Black character, 9 out of 10 times the Black character fits a stereotype about Black people. No wonder most Whites and even Blacks are conditioned to think Blacks are less intelligent and not as important as Whites.
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The problem is, everybody has to be something. Everybody. I’m a white guy, and a satirist and humorist at times. Once said there were three kinds of women. The tomato, the cupcake and the peach. Of course, these are really white types. And three kinds of guys. The stud, the dud and the pud.
Then I worked on it a little, and realized that in the “hippie” world (and there still is one after all these years) you would have to rework the idea. Three kinds of hippie women. The mama, the muffin and the cookie. Then there was the question of the guys in the hippie world. I finally realized that it was all the same everywhere. The stud, the dud and the pud.
Even in the black American world, stud and dud would apply. I’ll leave the issue of what the third type is and what to call it for someone else to work out.
Oh wait, I just came up with a new one, in real time. Remember the “greasers”? Fonzie? Happy Days? That stuff. Three kinds of white greaser guys. The cruiser, the schmoozer and the loser.
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@Anonymike
Well said. Even White people portray stereotypical characters on television too. Those two guys from Happy Days are a perfect example. Remember the Valley Girls? They played stereotypical White girls from the hills who were spoiled and spoke bad language.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Racial stereotypes in media are the nasty affects of brainwashing on the white privileged, as well as being a white supremacy tactic to ensure whites can stay at the top of the racial hierarchy.
Leveling the playing field in how non-whites are portrayed by allowing them to be non-stereotyped individuals in how whites write these characters, or better yet, letting PoC have the control over their characters’ development, would start to cause that system (white privilege and supremacy) to crumble.
They certainly won’t allow for that to happen.
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Unfortunately, stereotypes have shaped many people’s beliefs towards one another. One of the worst stereotypes placed on us, African-Americans, is laziness. Many whites and others (thanks to white racists) truly believe that blacks are lazy people. As God is my witness my 10th grade history teacher (a white guy) presented a chalk-board quiz (of 10 questions) that included the lazy stereotype of black people in America to me and my fellow classmates. I can recall the question saying: “In America, what race of people are considered lazy?” As black students we certainly didn’t say black people. Our mouths dropped when the teacher said “the correct answer is black people”. He quickly brushed the “correct answer” with a few 20th-century “hardworking” black accomplishments and inventions. After all of years I realized that my 10th grade history teacher was a white racist that included overt racism in his lesson plan.
Unfortunately, the black “lazy” stereotype is often seen in cartoons, TV sitcoms, and movies.
Here’s an old cartoon that depicts the lazy stereotype of blacks that my aunts and uncles grew up with:
(https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=sls5H4xVHys)
Here’s a couple of MUST READ articles on a man named Arthur Winston (1906-2006) that debunked the “lazy” stereotype of black people.
http:/www.npr.org/templates/story.php?storyId=5313522
http:/articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/15/local/me-winston15
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I’ve tested these serial sketches and they scored 8 out of 10. The series are about people who are referred to in Russia as ‘blacks’ (in derogatory sense, not as racially Blacks). It looks almost as Caucasian version of Amos & Andy.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP9zujM5TWk&list=PL4z6Cf0nBUMVPgdVf1UiPUKCGTBh5GJkM&index=7)
The question is, however, how to tell a stereotype from an archetype?
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@ ARN
What is an archetype?
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