Stereotypes of racial prejudice

Imagine yourself as a young black teenage boy living on the south side of Chicago. There has never been a dad in the family that you can remember. Your mom is a decent caring person but she started having babies when she herself was a child and is now working two or three low-paying jobs just to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of her three children because you have a younger sister and an older brother. We're not born with a priori knowledge of norms, values and morals so we have to learn those things and most people learn them from family, church and school but those avenues are pretty much closed to you. Because your mother works so much, she's hardly ever home to teach you ANYTHING, there is no father, you practice no religion or the religion you DO practice carries no faith with it on your part because your life isn't anywhere close to being the same as the characters in the bible. You go to school when you have to but it's more of an armed encampment than a place of learning. It attempts to serve the kids in your neighborhood but you live in the worst neighborhood in the city with crime rates high and employment rates low. So the administrators, teachers and cops who work at the school on a daily basis go every day with just the hope of surviving rather than teaching or helping the students become better citizens.

Your brother is a gang-banger and your sister is a crack whore so you're not learning anything positive from them either. Your brother often has members of his gang over to your run-down apartment to do drugs and talk about their next criminal enterprise and your sister often brings customers home to support her crack-cocaine habit.

If we have to learn norms, values and morals, who are you going to learn them from? They just don't appear to you out of thin air. We don't have an epiphany in the middle of the night that teaches us right from wrong. Someone has to teach us and when there is no one, our ability to develop a value system is seriously threatened. Your friends aren't going to teach you because they're all in on the crime wagon. They do that because you live in a neighborhood where the norm is deviance not law-abiding. People aren't rewarded in your neighborhood for abiding by the law and doing good deeds, people are rewarded by breaking the law and getting arrested because getting busted by the "fuzz" is worn like a badge of honor.

So the dynamics you're exposed to literally since birth have been dynamics that encourage you to become deviant and a law-breaker and not normative and law abiding. And because this is the only family and the only neighborhood you have, you do what everybody else is doing and that's what the rest of us do to. We just have the benefits of positive role-modeling and you don't. In your neighborhood, those people who are trying to do the best they can do under difficult circumstances are seen as Uncle Toms and are put down and ridiculed rather than praised and respected because that's seen as a weakness rather than a strength.

So you start roaming the streets, hanging out with the bad boys, becoming a gang member and pretty soon your behavior becomes known to all of us in terms of police statistics and news headlines. All of us know about the gang wars in Chicago's south side and the murders that go along with them but few if any of us know about the thousands of other blacks in Chicago who are trying to do the best they can do and are succeeding.

Because success doesn't grab headline news. Doing what you're supposed to do doesn't either. The only blacks we hear about are the gang-bangers and the hip-hoppers who spread negative images of black culture instead of positive ones and because most of us only know black culture from what we see and hear on television and in the media, we stereotype ALL blacks into this negative culture of a few and quickly decide that they're all living on welfare, they're all committing crimes, they're all murdering others, they're all gang members and none of them make any positive contributions to our society at all. That's how stereotypes begin and it's how they continue.

But we have to remember that a stereotype is a caricature, not a reality. Some fit the definition of a stereotype but most don't. But we rely on stereotypes because they're easy and require little work or effort on our part. I hear friends of mine who were born, raised and still live in an area of the state that is almost exclusively white use the same stereotypes to put down and demean blacks every day because they believe them to be true, although they don't have any first-hand knowledge at all.

And by the way, stereotypes aren't the province of just one race; every race and every religion has them and we tend to see far more negative results than positive ones from these stereotypes, regardless of who harbors them in their hearts.

Life isn't easy; it's hard. And one of the hardest things about life is fact-checking every stereotype of other people that you have in order to confirm or refute the accuracy of that stereotype. And if you find out it's not a complete picture of an individual, which it never is, it's incumbent on all of us to replace the stereotype with individual knowledge of the person which is always much more accurate than a stereotype anyhow; it's just a lot harder to do.

There are people in this world I don't like. People who have demonstrated to me more than once that they're not good people and that they're not contributing to the public good. That they think only about themselves and in doing so, take up precious space and breathe good air without contributing to society in any meaningful way at all. But my feelings towards these people are based on personal knowledge and experience and not a stereotype that I got from somebody else.

I would hope your experiences and definitions of others reflect the same kind of work.