Atomic Nerds

It occurs to me in that “no supporting evidence but my own observations” way that there is a distinct pattern in which people develop their prejudices and bigotries large and small, one that revolves around the degree of experience that person has in interacting with an identified group.

If it’s a group you have very extensive experience with and know very well, real bigotries don’t develop because you know that group too well; either you identify with the group yourself, or you simply have enough broad experience within it to know that the people making it up vary a tremendous amount and developing hard-and-fast good/bad stereotypes is not only undesirable, but pointless. You might know that group’s usual foibles and good and bad tendencies and have opinions about those aspects of the group, but you don’t think about them in terms of “(group name) are (adjective)”.

If it’s a group you don’t know and have no experience with, then you generally don’t have bigotries about them because there’s no *point* in developing much in the way of stereotypes about a group you don’t interact with. You might have some hilarious misconceptions or simplified mental pictures of them just because you lack information, but they’re not typically value-laden unless and until you mentally sort them into same basket as some other group you DO have experience with in order to integrate/simplify your worldview a little more. No American would have reason to be bigoted against, say, members of the Kikuyu ethnic group of Africa, but they might fold them into a broader group of “black people” when attempting to create a Grand Unified Theory of Race to justify his stereotype of the black people he’s familiar with. Americans generally have no stereotypes about, say, ethnic Mongolians at all, simply because they have no reason at all to.

Prejudices positive and negative, as well as real bigotries, tend to develop in that area of overlap between “people I identify as part of my world” and “people that are strange to me”. It’s easiest to observe in areas where a particular prejudice isn’t broadly socially unacceptable- witness the incest and stupidity jokes that come out of the woodwork when an urban liberal is discussing anything that poor white Appalachians or Gulf Coast southerners do. People that wouldn’t dream of doing anything but respectfully studying the culture of any group seen as “foreign” enough feel more than free to paint a group they see as an unfamiliar aspect of their own culture in cartoonish stereotypes- up to and including ones they see positively. Noble-savage stereotypes about American Indians are typically rooted in exactly the same mental processes as the cousin-humping redneck ones, they’re just colored by admiration rather than contempt.

Racism tends to work this way as well; whatever immediate experiences you have of it tend to go along the lines of the larger minority groups in your area. If you live in the Southwest, hispanics are the “relevant” ethnic group, and most of your experiences of racism probably relate to them, but not as much if at all to black people. If you live in the South, the opposite is probably true, and if you live in Alaska, the experience most likely shifts to natives. Only the people rubbing up against you, but not closely enough to be seen as “family”, are relevant enough to be worth bigotry.

Posted current events, Ranting |