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.
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.
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…
Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist. Surely that’s less racist than acknowledging the truth!
Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
We must all be missing the “All white people are like this” sign you must’ve found in the comic 🤪
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?
