Johnathan Pryor
Ms. Williams
English 1A
December 20, 2013
Poverty
and Stereotypes
“Hey
Josh I have a joke for you!” “What is it Doug?” “What’s long and black, Josh?”
“Doug I don’t like where this is going…” “The unemployment line! You need to
get your head out of the gutter hahahaha” Josh and Doug are two fictional
characters that I created out of the blue. Now, what was in the dialogue has
been used in real life. I have heard that "joke" used on so many
different occasions and it has disgusted me every single time. There are a long
list of racist jokes about stereotypes and people that live in poverty. Black,
white, Indian, Mexican; there are racist jokes about everyone in the car used
on the daily as if they don't matter. To a lot of people saying things like this
is second nature know. Our culture has turned backwards in this regard. How
have we let such a hurtful and degrading thing grow in our society? Things like
this hold our society back, and ourselves, from moving forward with life. There
are several side effects of using jokes like this and stereotypes, like Asians
can't see and that Indian people smell bad. Things like this bring everyone
down instead of lifting each other up. I believe that we should strive to help
bring each other up because making fun stereotypes and poverty lead to false
accusations against some races , forcing kids to drop out of school, and they
keep us from seeing everyone for who they are; a human being just like you and
me.
Stereotypes are
not always true. In many cases they are very wrong and used by very ignorant
people. Things like the long black unemployment line are false. Maybe in some
communities where the population is 95 percent black the line for unemployment
would be only black but you cannot create a stereotype about a race based off
of such a small sample in the population. Statisticians would call anyone who
made a judgment like that are very ignorant. I'm sure that somewhere down south
in a very white community there is an unemployment line that is all white. In
the book the Rich and Rest of Us, by Cornel West, it says, ‘’the folk we
met were white like Diane, black like us; brown, yellow, and every other shade.
Poverty refused to discriminate.”(p13) Recently
the economy has taken a turn for the south and times have been hard on
everyone. My uncle was laid off from Chesapeake Energy and he is white so I
know firsthand that the stereotype of poverty and unemployment line being all
black is false and the people in the book saw that poverty and unemployment
come in all shades and colors. These type of stereotypes don't do anything
except for the race that is directed towards and make the person who says the
look extremely ignorant that is just one example with two negative side effects
of being stereotypical. The only thing that comes from stereotypes is bad.
Students
are vicious. They think everything is a joke and that there will be no
consequences for anything they say because we teach at a young age that,
“sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me”. Words hurt
a lot and so much so that students drop out or leave schools because of how
much they are picked on. “Jamison grew up in Quitman and has painful memories
of 1960’s-era racism. He was one of the first ten black children to attend the all-white
school in Marks, just two miles from Lambert. Jamison was harassed so much that
he quit that same year and returned to his neighborhood black school.”(West
50). You might be thinking that, well, was back in the 1960's when racism was
really bad but even today there are kids who have to drop out of school because
they're bullied past their breaking point. Every once in a while there are
stories in the news that a boy or a girl has committed suicide or has given up
on education because of other students harassing them to the point of breaking.
Students who bully other students use tools like racial slurs and by using
stereotypical things in order to get under they're victim’s skins. Everyday
students drop out of school because of malicious bullies that use stereotypes
in order to keep someone down.
Somewhere
during the growth of a human the notion of helping others is lost and we try to
degrade each other; we lose sight of who we really are and start subdividing
each other into separate “races”. There are no different races; in fact there
is only one race and that is the race of Homo sapiens. According to Professor
Gravely, at Chabot College, that there are different ethnic backgrounds and
that we are all the same thing. In reality, by using the stereotypes about
poverty and race we, are insulting ourselves and putting ourselves down. We are
all the same. We are all humans and we should lift each other up in order to
bring each other up.
People
produce their best when they are lifted up. I believe that we as a culture need
to lift one another up and start bringing out the best in each other. Humans
have turned down a path that brings everyone down. People who are lifted up
strive to do better. Take professional football players for example. As the
game is played the crowd cheers more and more when a big play is needed in
order to bring out the best in the football players. Usually players do better
when they have the crowd lifting them up. This would happen in everyday life if
we were to lift up our fellow human beings. Instead of bringing each other down
we should strive to bring our fellow homo sapiens up in order to create a
better society.
The
society we live in uses crude stereotypes about race, like the joke I started
with about the unemployment line, and poverty. Things like this lead to false
accusations against certain ethnicities. In some cases it causes students to
drop out of school for no reason. We also insult ourselves when using them
because we are all the same thing; human beings. If we were to be nice and lift
each other up then the world would be a much better place.
