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
Around half of the US population has hypertension.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t want your doctor just assuming you have it and start treating it though.
The reason why stereotypes are bad is because even if there’s aggregate data trends on a broad population basis, that doesn’t necessarily translate to individualized specifics.
Statistically, black math scores are worse than white.
In my high school, I was in Calculus BC in my senior year, along with most of the other smartest kids in my grade.
One of the few black students at my prep school had been in that class in his junior year and for his senior year just sat one on one with the math teacher because he was a full year ahead of us. He was also the student that I used to get the most competitive with playing chess in the student lounge (because he was legit better than me and the few victories I’d eek out were actual accomplishments), and was the one of my friends to go off to Stanford.
It’d be a real shame if someone looking at him decided that based on broad statistics relating to the melanin in his skin that he wasn’t as good at math as someone with less melanin.
And personally, I’d think anyone making that leap of logic was a goddamn moron.
(Also, pro tip - it’s worth thinking about the differences between averages and distributions around those averages if you are going to make an argument for there being merit in extrapolating from statistics. For example, you are more likely to be told by a mother with a child that the father is not in the picture by a white mother than a black mother if you ask the question of every mother you see.)
Around half of the US population has hypertension.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t want your doctor just assuming you have it and start treating it though.
I have to disagree with a reply to this before me because I think this example doesn’t do the comment about statistics mentioned above justice.
You don’t want your doctor to treat you for hypertension, but you want him to check you for it to catch it early if you have it if you fall into a category that makes it more likely you have hypertension. This does not mean he should ignore the possibility of a disease in a non-high-risk group either.
Equally, black students being statistically speaking worse at math does not mean you should look at a black student and assume he is bad in math. But it can mean that funding for programs targeted at helping minority students going to math tutoring can be better justified.
I will not argue that based on statistics you should make assumptions about people, hell no. This is obviously racist. But assuming statistics (and being aware of them) are first and foremost racist would just be equally wrong.
The phrasings in the meme can be described as racist. But the structural problems that racism created and that lead to these assumptions cannot be fought by ignoring them.
But it can mean that funding for programs targeted at helping minority students going to math tutoring can be better justified.
But this ignores the issue of frequency I hint at in the bottom parenthetical.
Let’s say for the sake of argument black students are 2x as likely as white students to fail a math class and need to retake it.
Breaking it out by racial cross tabs may well suggest a policy of adding a math support program exclusively for black students.
The problem is that at a frequency basis, (0.616 times X) > (0.121 times 2X). So your well intentioned program just excluded a greater number of students that are going to fail math than the number of students you are going to include.
A better approach would be to identify what students are struggling with math irrespective of their melanin, and ensure adequate resources are tailored to them.
The only way a melanin specific math program makes sense is if the specific factors relating to why a given student is struggling with math is unique to their melanin such that a broader program focused on math won’t address those issues.
But even in terms of unique causes or factors, my guess is that the melanin specific crosstab is a poor metric selection, as it simply correlates with multiple other factors which more closely track with performance, such as household income levels, parent availability at home, parent education levels, etc.
So a program that was focused instead on things like “math support for kids who don’t have a parent who has high school math level competency at home” is going to be much more successful for many more students than one focused on “students with a lot of melanin who are struggling with math.”
It’s a shitty metric that persists because it’s easy to classify and because for some things it is a causative factor in and of itself (such as criminal injustice).
I really like your hypertension/doctor example, it’s a useful way to frame things. Thanks for sharing.
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.
Your quote doesn’t support your claim. 69% of black mothers being unmarried does not mean they’re single mothers. It definitely correlates, but one doesn’t mean the other.
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Unmarried and single are different things.
This sounds like one of those crime rate arguments for justifying racism without looking at any of the other factors.
Your choice of wording is odd, like “problem”, and “better.” I am 30 years old. I have been with my partner for 15 years, and we have an 8 and a 6 year old child together. We live together in our 4 bedroom home. Yes, we are black. No, there is no struggle associated with us being unmarried.
Congratulations on 15 years together.
In the US, there are legal and financial advantages to marrying your partner. It sounds like you’re in it for the long haul so it’s worth thinking about. Have a chat about it with your lawyer or accountant, they’ll make the case much better than I can.
Statistics show that white people are more likely to develop skin cancer than other racial groups. Would that problem be fixed by asking every white person you meet who has mole on their face if they have skin cancer?
It is racist/sexist/discriminatory to make assumptions on individuals based on statistics.
The statistics can still be true and can be used to counter discrimination against specific groups.
To expand a little I feel it’s more that people do not understand racism appropriately rather than not wanting to speak about reality. People, ironically, fear being labeled. For most racism is blatant and obvious. A “do not say or do these specific things” mentality. This leads to the misunderstanding. The reality (as you say) is we should acknowledge racism. By acting like it isn’t there we are doing a disservice to the people who are affected by the systemic issues that do exist.
In the U.S. this is very much a larger cultural issue, while also being a problem elsewhere in the world. If I had to guess: Cultures with stronger authoritarian leanings in significant sub-cultures such as work and familial structures also see stronger racism or similar beliefs on the same tree. How is this fought? Humility and acknowledgement.
However, this comic is largely talking about how stereotypes harm individuals…
- Nice
Agreed. But I wonder if this is butting up against a limitation of the human brain. Every person across the globe experiences stereotypes. It seems to be a natural way the human brain forms initial judgements. Hell, I don’t think the comic artist realized they were making a stereotype when they made all the questions askers white.
Being aware of it helps but the best fix is to have a significant amount of personal time with the group in question. This is why it’s so frustrating for someone of a particular race to hear questions like this, because they have plenty of first hand experience with members of their race. Themselves, their family, etc…
But realistically a person can’t spend significant amounts of time with members of every discreet group of people they might see on a daily basis.
It’s not that exaggerated if you live in central Europe.
Snowflakes in these comments hurt when someone’s lived experience is pointed out when it’s not even saying they’re the ones being racist. Same people who get upset at fast food workers getting higher wages as if that has any direct impact on them (other than the whole getting our economy and society into a better place).
First question in the interview I had a few years ago: “Do you have a green card?”
I was born here asshole. I’m brown skinned.
Exactly, and for any white people in the comments about to say “well they have to ask everyone to know you can legally work,I get asked about my citizenship status too in the job interviews, it’s just a box HR has to tick”
Yes, it is just a box HR has to tick, which is why they will usually ask after a few other questions, and in my pasty pale experience, they ask me “and just confirming you’re legally eligible to work in [country], are you a citizen… Or a PR” and the trail off, they don’t ask about working visas or our equivalent of green cards, they assume I’m going to say “yes, citizen” and move on.
Meanwhile my partner, who is also white, but from his accent he is clearly not “from here” will also get similar treatment, they wait until a few questions into the interview, they ask about his legal work eligibility, they will mention working visas in the question, but it’s still coming from a place of genuine information gathering.
My brown cousins on the other hand? “do you have a work visa?” is one of the first questions they get asked. Not even “do you have the legal right to work here? Like a Work visa or citizenship”, just straight up “do you have a work visa?” because the assumption is that they are not a citizen or PR because of their skin colour.
If a white person applied for a job in China or India, they’d ask that too. Stop assuming everything is racism.
It is racist for that to happen either direction.
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I thought about it and… yes it is racist
Well you’re entitled to your opinion. Even if you’re wrong
“China and India are prejudiced based on race, why do we keep calling prejudice based on race here racist?! Checkmate feminazis!” 🤣
Yeah it’s not. It’s normal to ask that question because white people generally don’t come from there. It’s not that deep.
It is literally pre-judging someone based on race. Just because that judgement is statistically likely to be correct doesn’t make it okay
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Lol I’ve seen this first hand so many times. “When did you come to Canada? Is this your first winter? Have you seen snow before? Was it hard learning English?” Like, do you think Canada just recently opened its borders and everyone who isn’t white must be new?
What I hate is that some folks I know who aren’t white have come to expect this kind of thing. Knew a great guy at work of Indian descent, got to meet him in person for the first time and I asked him where he was from. Normal question when you personally are an army brat and pinged around the country in your formative years.The response was “Well my grandparents are from India”.
I have never cringed so hard, and was quick to say “Shit, no, I meant did you grow up in Toronto, or did you used to live in some other place in Canada before?”. Made me think about how many people did that “No, where are you really from” shit with him before.
Back in the 80s one of my first jobs out of university was working downtown Toronto. One of my coworkers was this effervescent woman of Japanese-Canadian descent.
She would talk about what it was like meeting guys in clubs.
“So, where are you from?”
“Scarborough”
“Uh… no, I mean where are you originally from?”
(feigning an “oh I getcha now” moment) “Ohh okay, yeah… Saskatchewan”, since that’s where she really was from, previously.
I’m not brown but I was once mistaken for Mexican immigrant. The way the person treated me in that instance was really eye opening to me for how folks can get treated that I never otherwise would’ve have experienced.
These are all wildly inappropriate questions to ask a random stranger without some prior explicit context between the people.
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Are you surprised when a good meaning person asks when a slightly chubby woman is due, when she isn’t actually pregnant?
Actually, yes, because that’s been widely known as a risky question to ask for so long it would surprise me. Then I would question them actually being a well-meaning person.
For fun.
My sister was standing outside a gas station with a close friend of hers. Her friend was enjoying a cigarette when an old man walked up to her and said, “You know, you aught to give that baby a chance!”
She was not pregnant. That was the moment that turned her around and made her go on a diet though, poor thing.
My sister said she cried for days.
Lol, if it got her to diet then it’s working and doing some good somehow 😂.
Not surprised, but I’m also not convinced it’s well-meaning so much as ignorance to the effect of their own actions. Otherwise, I think were mostly on the same page. It generally should be considered uncool to ask someone a personal questions without a valid reason to do so, regardless of age, genital status, or arbitrarily assigned category loosely based upon skin or the overall attitude of one religious group towards another.
For all the people missing the point of this comic particularly in the U.S.: Look at who has held political and financial power for the last two hundred years, including this one. There are lots of pictures and paintings of people. Do you notice anything in common between nearly all of them besides having wealth and power? Think about the position of everyone else not fitting that description and tell us all again why you personally feel attacked and why this comic is not relevant.
This is why I simply don’t ask people about their personal lives. I’ll talk to them about it and ask questions if they bring it up but I will never be the one to bring it up. There’s just too many possible awkward scenarios and I don’t really care that much. I also don’t really like answering questions about my own personal life.
Ok, all that aside, that third chick asking about college— what does that shirt mean…? No clothes hangers? Is that an abortion statement or does she just like folded clothes over hung ones?
Definitely a pro-choice statement: “Don’t make women resort to [risky abortion techniques]”
I especially like her panels because it illustrates that even liberal, socially conscious people need to stay aware of their own biases. I try to be a progressive person, but that certainly doesn’t mean I’m immune to this sort of thing.
Yup, it’s really well done
I assumed it was an abortion statement (pro-choice, as in, “don’t make women resort to unsafe back alley clotheshanger abortions”).
i think it could be a reference to saying no to plastic clothes hangers, since clothes hangers are an enormous source of plastic waste.
Edit: yes i understand the anti dangerous abortion symbolism, but here are some sources to explain the environmental impacts that are starting to gain some press.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plastic-hanger-fun-fact-20-billion-landfills-every-year-gary-barker
I like that take, and I’m going to go charish my lovely ceder hangers for more than just their rustic smell.
I think a funnier version of this was Ms. Morello from everybody hates chris lol
So comical.
It’s almost like time progresses
I think you’re missing the point of the comic. Time is progressing for both women, and the people talking to them in the comments have questions based on where that woman is in her life and development.
While both women are in the same stage of life, the questions being asked are not the same questions.
The people asking que to the the woman of colour are brining a bucket load of presumptions to the conversation.
The comic is pointing out how racial prejudice or even innocent assumptions are forms of microagressions, as the questions asked to the white woman are mostly purely information gathering, where as the questions towards the black woman first require her to correct a misconception before she can even answer the question.
ITT: Virtue signalling.
Oh, the irony.
Isn’t pointing that out your own attempt at virtue signalling… ie you’re so much better because you’re above it all?
I have a better hypothesis; the comic its self is about the virtue, morality, and ethics of different social behaviours…
…so if that’s the topic in the comic, then THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT EVERY SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT!
Like, do you expect people to not be discussing the comic in the comments? What else did you expect? See how your little holier than thou comment doesn’t actually make sense in the light of this.
At some point you have to think for yourself about what you see, rather than regurgitating familiar political slogans as if that’s actual thought.
It’s funny how the people writing comics like these don’t see that they are perpetuating a stereotype themselves.
Racist sterotypes are worse than sterotypes about racists.
pOiNTInG oUt rAciSm iS ThE sAmE aS bEInG RaciSt
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).
I mean as a soon to be 29 year old that grew up kind of sheltered for the longest time I had a minimal knowledge of racial stereotypes. It wasn’t until I started seeing stuff like this post that I even knew that a lot of people (as an example) assumed black girls holding babies were holding their own kids.
I would’ve had to come up with that stereotype all on my own … and honestly I don’t think I ever would have.
If someone had proposed the idea of putting on black face to dress up as Obama for Halloween, in another life I could’ve seen myself going for it because I’ve liked Obama ever since he was running for office back in 08 and I had no idea about the “black face” connotations until the last few years. It wouldn’t have been any more controversial (to my innocent mind) than putting on a red wig to be the joker.
Surely I can’t be the only one that … had no idea about this stuff and no way to perpetuate it in any malicious way because of that.
Like… I agree with you, but also I do feel like there’s something to this point. Teaching racial stereotypes and framing conversations in terms of race definitely keeps race in the spotlight in some circumstances when other factors might be better focal points.
I was also someone that grew up in Appalachia… and let me tell you, it’s interesting that black people and appalachian people are on opposite sides, the poverty, the bigotry against the appalachian subculture, the warm feelings about the law breaking moonshine running “good old boys” from some folks, etc, there’s a lot of rhymes in the circumstances.
I think that’s part of what some rural people get so offended about. Like the dude that works at Walmart and lives in a crap trailer with undrinkable well water … walking up to that guy and telling him about his “white privilege” also feels, wrong.
It was weird to me when I went to college (first in my family to go to a 4 year school) and there were people just casually talking about vacations featuring airplanes and international travel. Like, the people that did “fancy” big vacations that I remember from my home town were going to Myrtle Beach not Greece.
I feel like a lot of people are talking past each other … and to be clear I’m not discounting that race is still an issue in the US that’s systemic and needs addressed, but it does feel like there’s some nuance that’s been lost in the broader conversation.
Perhaps with a different approach/tone some more people could find common ground. It’s a hard problem.
I tend to agree. It would work if you could simultaneously adjust everyone in the culture, but that’s really only possible if the population is small. In large populations it’s more effective to shame people who are being racist.
That’s unrelated to this comic though, Morgan Freeman is correct that people shouldn’t arbitrarily bring someones race into a conversation.
But this comic isn’t doing that this comic is pointing out racism, and racism should always be pointed out and labelled as such when it is seen, because as a society we need to browbeat the shit out of people who are consistently racist and you can’t do that unless you go and say “that’s racist”
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?
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.
Oooooooh. I see.
Thats the charitable answer, and one I kind of agree with in some cases.
The uncharitable one is “Why all the racists gotta be white!?!” Which is just lazy whataboutism.
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.
A lot of people don’t realize that the word gypsy has negative connotations or was ever used as a slur. For a lot of people, it’s the only word they’ve ever heard to describe Romani people.
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. The negative association being forgotten seems like a good thing, but the actual origin is bad.
I dunno, we can just sort of, never escape the long arm of history, I guess. I suppose that’s maybe a good thing, lest history just repeat itself, but, you know, barring like, more strict material, economic, or discriminatory concerns about racism, it can certainly kind of give a more major weight to what otherwise might be seen as innocent things or just kind of, historical oddities, or holdovers. I think probably, though, for every “gypped”, which is maybe a term that has lost racial connotation over time, there’s like, 30 or 40 n-words and racial tropes that are much more overtly offensive, and I think it’s probably more important that those are called out as racist than that we sort of, become too overzealous and lament the death of innocence that comes with knowing “gypped” originates from a racial slur.
I also don’t think that more information is really a bad thing, in any case. I don’t think that an 80 year old woman who has maybe been hearing the term her whole life and has never heard the racial connotation, is going to meaningfully be depressed by like, hearing the frequency of that word, or something. That might be the case, but I mean, if she went 80 years without really making the correlation, it’s probably not the case that most people were using it against her in a negative way, and if even she only knew the history recently, it’s pretty easy for her to just go “oh, well, they don’t know the history of the term, really they mean cheap, they don’t mean anything by it”. I mean, ideally, right. People are more complicated than that, obviously, but I still don’t think the information itself is a bad thing.
like if I was Jewish
How much gold do we owe you for the comment?
This isnt Reddit…
Paypal and any major currency is fine.
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…
“Acknowledging racism is the real racism!”
is “racial generalization” your only touch point for what racism is
Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
BLOODY PEASANT!
Bloody peasant
But it is true that these kinds of unintentionally racist differences in commentary are often done by white people. Not all white people but a large enough subsection of that population to become a general problem.
That’s what the comic is pointing out.
Too many people are wildly overanalyzing this comic or getting needlessly insulted by it. I think your interpretation is the correct one.
Casual, unintentional racism is more of a problem than people generally realize, because they’re not even conscious of it. Racism doesn’t always show itself in overt acts of hatred or discrimination. Sometimes, a well-meaning person can say or do hurtful, insulting things because of racist assumptions they don’t know they’re making.
It’s the same way with sexism. It’s not always blatant “wOmAn bAd”
I’d go to a mechanic with my ex to get her car worked on and everyone only wants to talk to me. I’ve worked food service where our cashier was a woman and people would deliberately only talk to me. I had a pipe burst at my roommates house but because I’m the man the water service guy only wanted to talk to me.
That last one fucked with me the most cause I’m like “dude, this isn’t my house”
Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist. Surely that’s less racist than acknowledging the truth!
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We must all be missing the “All white people are like this” sign you must’ve found in the comic 🤪
I get what you’re saying, but that’s a bad argument. If a racist artist drew a black person with a bone through their nose, tats on their face, with a crack pipe in one hand and a bucket of KFC in the other, they can’t hide behind “where does my art say ‘All black people are like this’?”
That ain’t the same at all bud, but you can try and make it seem like that.
(Technically aren’t half the white people in the comic not actually being racist?)
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Waaah, “not all white people,” waaah!
Hit a nerve, did they?
