Recently I posted a comment on Huffington Post in which I said that African-American people should be more sympathetic or empathetic with gay people than they are since they are both minorities who have been discriminated against.
There was a reply to my comment in which the writer denied that the two groups should be compared. I have thought of a few reasons why maybe that person is right.
1. It was never illegal to be African-American.
2. It is not illegal for two African-Americans to marry one another nor for African-American couples to adopt children.
3. African-Americans are not told, from the pulpit, that they are sinners, simply because of who they are, or that they are going to hell because they are African-American.
4. No one has claimed that natural disasters such as floods and tornadoes are the result of God punishing America for tolerating African-Americans.
5. African-Americans may have their own bars and so forth, but those bars don't get raided by the police.
Yes, all those things have applied to gay people. And where discrimination in hiring and housing on the basis of race is illegal everywhere, gay people don't have that protection under federal law, so they may be legally discriminated against in some areas.
On the other hand, African-Americans do get called names (as gay people get called faggot) and sometimes are beaten up or even killed for who they are.
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein
Showing posts with label prejudice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prejudice. Show all posts
Monday, August 6, 2012
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Proportion of Single Black Women: My Take
ABC News NightLine last night ran a very interesting news story. It said that young black women have a harder time finding a marriage partner than single white women in the same age range. In fact, they said that 54% of black women never marry, as compared to 21% of white women.
Demographics were given as a reason. You take away the black men who are unemployed, those who are incarcerated, etc., and there are comparatively few left. The black women interviewed for the show understandably want to find a black male with income and social class comparable to their own, so they certainly are not going to consider those men among the prison population or the unemployed or the menially employed.
Steve Harvey, comedian turned counselor, weighed in and mentioned that black men just have less responsibility toward their female partners and less inclination to marry.
I think there is another reason that nobody dares to discuss. The way I see it is this: More black women than black men have good jobs, and thus can be in the middle class. (In places I have worked, I have seen black women well represented and in good positions; but if there were in fact any black men, they were likely to have jobs like janitor.) Maybe this suggests that more black women than men attain college educations and it would be interesting to see if statistics would bear this out. I think there is another reason, though. I think black women face less discrimination in the workplace. (And now comes the really unpopular thing that nobody is willing to admit.) This is because the white race has always been afraid of blacks, and that fear is directed much more toward black males than black females, who are perceived as much less threatening.
If a white person is walking on the street, or waiting for the el, late at night, is s/he going to be afraid if there is no one about but a black female? or if there is no one about but a black male?
Yes, these are the stereotypes in the minds of white people. Racism (which is pretty much equivalent to stereotypes) does exist. We all believe, but often won't admit, that there is a basis in fact for our stereotypes. I'm not going to weigh in on that question; let the reader contemplate it for himself.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein
Demographics were given as a reason. You take away the black men who are unemployed, those who are incarcerated, etc., and there are comparatively few left. The black women interviewed for the show understandably want to find a black male with income and social class comparable to their own, so they certainly are not going to consider those men among the prison population or the unemployed or the menially employed.
Steve Harvey, comedian turned counselor, weighed in and mentioned that black men just have less responsibility toward their female partners and less inclination to marry.
I think there is another reason that nobody dares to discuss. The way I see it is this: More black women than black men have good jobs, and thus can be in the middle class. (In places I have worked, I have seen black women well represented and in good positions; but if there were in fact any black men, they were likely to have jobs like janitor.) Maybe this suggests that more black women than men attain college educations and it would be interesting to see if statistics would bear this out. I think there is another reason, though. I think black women face less discrimination in the workplace. (And now comes the really unpopular thing that nobody is willing to admit.) This is because the white race has always been afraid of blacks, and that fear is directed much more toward black males than black females, who are perceived as much less threatening.
If a white person is walking on the street, or waiting for the el, late at night, is s/he going to be afraid if there is no one about but a black female? or if there is no one about but a black male?
Yes, these are the stereotypes in the minds of white people. Racism (which is pretty much equivalent to stereotypes) does exist. We all believe, but often won't admit, that there is a basis in fact for our stereotypes. I'm not going to weigh in on that question; let the reader contemplate it for himself.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
"We" and "They"
A lot of human prejudice, persecution, and even war seems to be the result of an innate or very deeply ingrained tendency of us humans to divide up all the other humans that we experience into "we" and "they." Group membership can be based on skin color, nationality, ethnicity, clan, tribe, religion, language, neighborhood, caste, college attended, even sports team supported—anything that can be a source of a person's identity.
Group members often stick to their own kind. It's not difficult to think of ethnic groups in America which are very cohesive--I'm sure I need not name any--and immigrants to America have frequently settled among others of their own group. (Of course there are practical advantages to this, such as facilitated communication if you haven't learned English.)
But just look at how prejudice dehumanizes the "other." Southern US slaveholders firmly asserted that Blacks were an inferior group and not totally human. German propaganda of the Nazi era asserted false racial doctrines that Jews (and in fact every "non-Aryan" group) were inferior. And the US did this, too, in its wartime propaganda and elsewhere. When the United States was in the process of seizing control of Hawaii from its native government under Queen Liliuokalani, US newspaper cartoonists depicted Liliuokalani as an ape-like creature who didn't deserve to be governing the American planters and missionaries living in Hawaii.
During World War II, US wartime propaganda depicted the Japanese enemy as having brutal, animal-like features—not to mention that in wartime it's often implied that the soldiers of the enemy, if they had the chance, would rape your wife and daughter. A very sad instance of this is that thousands of Okinawans killed themselves when, during World War II, it became obvious that American forces were going to capture their island, because they had been led by Japanese propaganda to believe that a successful incursion of Americans spelled automatic rape of all their women, and other atrocities.
It's also interesting to note that very many peoples call themselves by a name that means, in their own language, something like "the people" or "humans"; thus all others are not human. (Or, possibly--to give some homage to a counter argument--their name for themselves may date back to a time when they had no awareness of the existence of any other people.)
Is there some innate feature of our brains that predisposes us to decide whether every new human encountered is "one of us" or not? I'm not aware of any studies that used brain scans to try to see whether the activity of the brain differs during perception of a face as "one of us" or "non-us." Certainly that would be a very interesting question to study.
Or is it cultural, albeit with origins very far back in the history of our species? Here is my suggestion: Anthropologists use the term exogamy to denote the custom of tribes seeking their brides outside their own tribe. There are also endogamous tribes, whose customs demand marriage within the group--but many bands of humans may have discovered the genetic disadvantages of inbreeding, and thus exogamy evolved.
Well, how do you get brides from that "other" tribe, just the other side of the hill or across the stream? Bridal raiding parties! We all know the stereotyped image of the caveman, club in hand, carrying off his bride, dragging her by the hair. Bearing in mind that "cavemen" were the ancestors of modern Europeans, and that there are many other ancestral lines of peoples in the world, parties of warriors organized to capture brides for the tribe's young men existed widely.
This might be one explanation of why you find this paradigm so very widespread in the world: just over the horizon or beyond some natural barrier is a kindred people, with a cognate language, so that an objective onlooker might consider them brothers or at least cousins—and yet they hate one another.
Often there is an excuse. Think of the terrible and violent animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland—the product of history and religious differences. (In this case and in others, grievances are remembered that date back hundreds of years.) But I wager that, on the street, you can't tell who is which. So we can still hate even if folks don't look any different from us.
Update, October 27, 2011
I have to mention another cause of war, other than making war for the purpose of capturing brides. At the time in human history when agriculture and pastoralism were beginning, the idea of boundaries also arose: each tribe asserted a claim to the land it was using for its farms and its flocks; so it's easy to see that conflicts over a tribe's boundaries might arise.
Update, August 18, 2013
I showed above that during World War II it was not only the Germans who engaged in propoganda. Now I have to correct the possible impression that wartime propoganda started with World War II. It did not: before the US entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson set up the "Committee for Public Information," which was nothing more nor less than a propoganda machine intended to sell the American public on a war by such means as developing anti-German posters much like those that were used in the Second World War.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein
Group members often stick to their own kind. It's not difficult to think of ethnic groups in America which are very cohesive--I'm sure I need not name any--and immigrants to America have frequently settled among others of their own group. (Of course there are practical advantages to this, such as facilitated communication if you haven't learned English.)
But just look at how prejudice dehumanizes the "other." Southern US slaveholders firmly asserted that Blacks were an inferior group and not totally human. German propaganda of the Nazi era asserted false racial doctrines that Jews (and in fact every "non-Aryan" group) were inferior. And the US did this, too, in its wartime propaganda and elsewhere. When the United States was in the process of seizing control of Hawaii from its native government under Queen Liliuokalani, US newspaper cartoonists depicted Liliuokalani as an ape-like creature who didn't deserve to be governing the American planters and missionaries living in Hawaii.
During World War II, US wartime propaganda depicted the Japanese enemy as having brutal, animal-like features—not to mention that in wartime it's often implied that the soldiers of the enemy, if they had the chance, would rape your wife and daughter. A very sad instance of this is that thousands of Okinawans killed themselves when, during World War II, it became obvious that American forces were going to capture their island, because they had been led by Japanese propaganda to believe that a successful incursion of Americans spelled automatic rape of all their women, and other atrocities.
It's also interesting to note that very many peoples call themselves by a name that means, in their own language, something like "the people" or "humans"; thus all others are not human. (Or, possibly--to give some homage to a counter argument--their name for themselves may date back to a time when they had no awareness of the existence of any other people.)
Is there some innate feature of our brains that predisposes us to decide whether every new human encountered is "one of us" or not? I'm not aware of any studies that used brain scans to try to see whether the activity of the brain differs during perception of a face as "one of us" or "non-us." Certainly that would be a very interesting question to study.
Or is it cultural, albeit with origins very far back in the history of our species? Here is my suggestion: Anthropologists use the term exogamy to denote the custom of tribes seeking their brides outside their own tribe. There are also endogamous tribes, whose customs demand marriage within the group--but many bands of humans may have discovered the genetic disadvantages of inbreeding, and thus exogamy evolved.
Well, how do you get brides from that "other" tribe, just the other side of the hill or across the stream? Bridal raiding parties! We all know the stereotyped image of the caveman, club in hand, carrying off his bride, dragging her by the hair. Bearing in mind that "cavemen" were the ancestors of modern Europeans, and that there are many other ancestral lines of peoples in the world, parties of warriors organized to capture brides for the tribe's young men existed widely.
This might be one explanation of why you find this paradigm so very widespread in the world: just over the horizon or beyond some natural barrier is a kindred people, with a cognate language, so that an objective onlooker might consider them brothers or at least cousins—and yet they hate one another.
Often there is an excuse. Think of the terrible and violent animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland—the product of history and religious differences. (In this case and in others, grievances are remembered that date back hundreds of years.) But I wager that, on the street, you can't tell who is which. So we can still hate even if folks don't look any different from us.
Update, October 27, 2011
I have to mention another cause of war, other than making war for the purpose of capturing brides. At the time in human history when agriculture and pastoralism were beginning, the idea of boundaries also arose: each tribe asserted a claim to the land it was using for its farms and its flocks; so it's easy to see that conflicts over a tribe's boundaries might arise.
Update, August 18, 2013
I showed above that during World War II it was not only the Germans who engaged in propoganda. Now I have to correct the possible impression that wartime propoganda started with World War II. It did not: before the US entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson set up the "Committee for Public Information," which was nothing more nor less than a propoganda machine intended to sell the American public on a war by such means as developing anti-German posters much like those that were used in the Second World War.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein
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