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.