the ugly origins of stereotypes

If you've read Othello, you'll realize that Europeans didn't always consider Africans to be inferior. In fact the myth of African inferiority was created in the 19th century to justify the enslavement of Africans in the Americas and the conquest of Africa by the European powers. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, Africans facilitated their own conquest by selling each other to the Europeans—not that the Europeans were noble colonizers who intended to uplift the human spirit of the colonized. However, Africa's troubles today are due as much to their lack of political openness and their tolerance of corruption as they are to American and European farm subsidies and bad IMF loans.


This is not to suggest that somehow white people are superior to Africans. In fact, what I am trying to suggest is more complex. Certainly, well-run African countries like Ghana, Senegal, Botswana or Mozambique should suggest that Africans are quite capable of putting their own affairs in order. Just because a people, race, ethnicity, or country has had or continues to have trouble in organizing their political or economical situation does not mean that that group is biologically inferior. However, it also does not mean that that group of people's failures cannot be addressed, discussed, or even satirized.

My friend Phil had an interesting post about the problem with stereotypical representations of people in the media. One of the peoples' that he suggested got the short end of the stereotype stick were Southerners, being depicted as lazy and uneducated. However, the Southeastern section of the United States has not invested in the infrastructure of education as heavily as the North. This is mostly due to the unwillingness of an aristocratic class, which still exists, to fund public education, both for poor black students and for poor white students. Now this problem is being exacerbated by the politically and religiously divisive debate about private-school vouchers. Therefore, all Southerners need to shoulder the responsibility for their lack of educational opportunities and need to have this aspect of their polity discussed and satirized.

Phil found himself unable to defend Wes Anderson's use of Filipino, or possibly Indonesian, pirates in the movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. However, the fact of the matter is that a stereotypical pirate would have been a man with a peg-leg, a parrot, and a treasure chest, a la Johnny Depp. The fact that there are pirates in the South China Sea should be acknowledged. Secondly, the fact that pirates make their living from killing people and holding them hostage should also be held true. The fact that people make their living doing these things should be held in contempt and derided. However, in my initial analysis of this movie, I saw these pirates as representing the anti-colonial forces of the 20th century.


Representing people without stereotypes means not worrying so much about stereotypes when you represent people. If people create characters for the purpose of contradicting stereotypes it can often leave one with a sour aftertaste. Everyone got sick of the "Magical Black Man" in movies that was so quickly satirized by the character of "Gabriel" in The Simpsons. Making a person of color the villain, hero, victim, or simply the protagonist is a choice that should be made based on the story. In the same way, stereotypes should not keep artists from telling the truth about individual characters. Even Art Spiegelman depicted his Jewish father as being cheap in Maus, his great work about the Holocaust.

If one becomes too dogmatic about seeking out negative stereotypes in art, literature, and film then one will fail to see the infinite tragic complexity of the human story. This tragic complexity means that whatever our genetic patrimony or whatever societal preconceptions with which we were raised, we are all good and bad, beneficent and malignant, sincere and disingenuous, and that there is no piece of artwork that can trap the aching beauty of that truth.