Rasism and Brent Staples - Research Paper Example

?592611 Brent Staples paper Currently Brent Staples works for the New York Times editorial board. He writes about race, culture, and education. He holds a Ph.d. in psychology from the University of Chicago. His success is not unique, but many in this country think it is. That is because of a commonly held view that many, maybe even most, black men are incarcerated, drug addicts, rap singers, basketball players or president of the United States. These stereotypes of black men come out of long held beliefs about them that are for the most part false. While, like all stereotypes, people could point to one instance of the truth of a stereotype, there is no overwhelming proof that should cause people to categorically deny any other image. Unfortunately, most of the stereotypes of black men are based on either a few bad actors or long-held myths about black men that result from a racist past and present. In “Black Men and Public Spaces” Staples talks about how it felt to be the target of a racial stereotype—that of young black thug. He recounts how white women who encountered Staples walking at night in Chicago and New York would run away from him, cross the street, lock their car doors, and openly demonstrate their fear of him. While many who were stereotyped in this way would be angry and proclaim the unfairness of it, Staples chose to handle it in another way. He was sympathetic and did not seem angry with those strangers who would accuse him without evidence. “I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect” (Staples 384-385). Just in his reaction to the way these women treated him, Staples subverts the stereotype. Staples says that he looked like a stereotypical thug: over six feet tall, with a beard and a wild Afro, wearing a military coat. His solution to counteract the stereotype was to whistle Vivaldi tunes and other classical melodies so that strangers who thought he might be dangerous would see the incongruency of his look with his obvious intelligence and decency. This, he thought would reassure them that just because he was a black male did not mean he was dangerous. Frequently, it worked because people would join in and whistle or hum along with him. Surely, those experiences helped to change the minds of some of the people Staples he encountered. Staples demonstrated a lot of grace when many people white or black would have rightfully been offended by the actions of these strangers who automatically assumed because of the way he looked, he must be a dangerous person. At first, he admits to being “surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed,” but he clearly comes to sympathize with his silent accusers. Staples explains his patience with these openly racist strangers comes from knowing the statistics. Shaun Harper, another young black man, articulates the same understanding in another way. “In America, [black men] have long been regarded as criminals, irresponsible fathers, descendants of dysfunctional families, self-destructive drug addicts, materialistic lovers of flashy possessions, and violent rapists of White women . . . . These attributes are typically used to render us collectively undeserving of trust, respect, equitable pay and workplace promotion, and fairness” (Harper 697). Staples says he had known thugs growing up and had seen some of these tough guys end up in prison or die on the street in a violent way, so he understands why black men are stereotyped in the ways that Harper lists, but Staples still believes it is unfair to stereotype even if he understands why people do. “Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening” (Staples 386). Even though Staples demonstrates graciousness and self-preserving caution, readers detect the underlying feeling of injustice at having to do so. After all, here is a clearly intelligent young man who had thus far avoided any criminal record or other detrimental associations, trying to better his life by attending college, yet he is taken to be nothing more than a street thug by people unwilling to give him a chance to prove himself to be unlike their stereotype of him. Perhaps Staples’ graciousness comes out of a realization that everybody holds some sort of stereotype about others. It is the way humans sort and categorize information and learn about whom to include for the best advantage and whom to avoid for safety sake. Unfortunately, rather than suspending unjust reactions to stereotyped information, most people act on the information based on the stereotype. In other words, just because a young black man is walking down the street in the middle of the night does not mean he is out looking for white women to mug or rape. However, it might mean that he is too, so any cautious woman might act to prevent the young man from coming after her to be safe. Understandable behavior to be sure, but also unfair because a young white man probably would not generate the same kind of fear although he should. Not only that, the exaggerated fear of the young black man is not as warranted as many may think. Fear has generated these beliefs in people, but often the resulting stereotype has no basis whatsoever in history or reality. Stereotypes are often based on what a person has heard about the characteristic traits of a group of people s/he is stereotyping, not what an individual member of that group may actually have done. People learn to stereotype from all sorts of places: television, internet, school, work, family—really anywhere and everywhere there are messages that consciously or unconsciously feed the way humans classify others who do not look, act, dress, sound, or live in the same ways as they themselves do. However, these images of black men have little to do with facts. Harper’s list, for example, consists of several ways black men are stereotyped. Two of the most common and most damaging stereotypes are that the majority of black men are criminals, and violent rapists of White women—the one stereotype Staples seems not only to resent most but also to sympathize with most. While there may be black men who are criminals and/or rapists, the reason that these labels became long held beliefs about a group of people is not based on those incidents but on false and unjustified myths about black men. Take for instance the fact that many believe most young black men are criminals. Simon Wendt explains this image of black man as armed and dangerous comes from times when the Ku Klux Klan and other racists threatened black families. Black men saw it as their duty to protect their family like most men would regardless of race. “Scholars of armed resistance in the southern civil rights struggle, on the other hand, have hinted at the interrelationship between black masculinity and armed self-defence against racist aggression.” (Wendt 544). While carrying a gun was most certainly necessary at the time, if frightened many white people who feared retaliation from former slaves. That fear stuck because it was exaggerated and perpetuated by racists who use it as an excuse to continue to oppress black men. One of the greatest fears now is of armed black gangs. Granted, the stories of gang violence make this fear not unfounded, but it is not the genesis of the fear. The stereotype started because of an understandable and justified reaction to extreme racism. Now the racism has just gone underground, gotten more subtle, but is still every bit as damaging as it was the one hundred years between the Civil War and Civil Rights. The fact that young black men may be armed seems to upset people more than the fact that young white men may be also. Another reason that the overt racism of the century that followed Emancipation was allowed to continue for the most part unchecked is that some of the perpetrators were lawmen. Under the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan nobody could say for sure who they were. If someone did identify them, well, they better just keep their mouths shut. The same sort of attitude prevails in many police departments today. Racial profiling is a common “tool” of law enforcement. Just last month a Staten Island police officer, Michael Daragjati, an eight-year veteran assigned to the NYPD’s anti-crime unit was patrolling in plainclothes with his partner when “they stopped the black man in the Stapleton section for an unknown reason on the evening of April 15, the feds said. ’Daragjati forcibly pushed [the man] against the side of a parked car and roughly frisked him,’ according to court papers. The cop did not find contraband or a weapon on the man. When the man griped about his treatment, Daragjati promptly arrested him—although he had no probable cause, feds said”[emphasis added] (Maddux). “The Feds,” it turns out were already watching Daragjati for another reason having nothing to do with his racism. That issue was not even on their radar. It just so happened that they witnessed the incident described above and that was a better reason for arresting Daragjati than the beef for which they were investigating him. Yet this blatant racist worked for the police for eight years. Surely others in the department knew of his propensity, but no one did anything about it. The police are supposed to defend all citizens, not just their co-workers, but, sadly, that is not the case. Instead police officers enforce more than the law. They enforce negative stereotypes about black young men without giving them a chance. Andrea Dottolo and Abigail Stewart claim that because the general population trust the police, when the police target and arrest young black men, the public believes it must be justified. Law enforcement officers embody an institutionalized regulating force, operating on those designated as criminals or suspects. Perhaps because of the quantity and richness of detail in accounts of the police, some social scientists have explored citizen–police encounters as an example of the relationship between social identities and institutional structures. For instance, Young (2004) showed, in his study of marginalized Black men, that nearly all of them had been detained by the police at some time, . . .”often for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” (Dottolo and Stewart 351) But stereotypes of black men as criminals goes beyond any sort of general thuggery or stereotypes generated by racist police officers. Staples specifically writes about the way white women feared him and Harper says that black men are often stereotyped as the rapists of white women. This is probably the most unfair of all the stereotypes about black men. It stems from the same era as the irrational fear of armed black men. “When mob violence emerged as a new form of social control in the 1870s and 1880s, most white men conceptualised lynching exclusively in terms of ‘protecting’ white women from stereotypical black rapists. . . .It also allowed them to assert their masculinity by proclaiming themselves guardians of southern white womanhood” (Wendt 545). Lynchings were used to keep black men in line with or without a rape charge, often for other “offenses” and most of the time the charge was not legitimate. The idea that such atrocities were perpetuated needed some sort of legitimacy, so the myth that lynchings were carried out because extremely virile black men had no control over their sexual urges and constantly pursued white women as the target of these urges was generated and stuck. Such behavior “deserved” some sort of radical retaliation and lynching became the answer. Lynching is just vigilantism at its meanest and most undeserved. Robert Gibson describes lynching as “hanging or shooting, or both. However, many were of a more hideous nature—burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture” (Gibson). This sort of cruelty was carried out without a trial, a judge, or a jury, just a mob and their grotesquely skewed sense of justice, usually within a short time, perhaps within hours or minutes, of the alleged incident. “Southern folk tradition has held that Negroes were lynched only for the crimes of raping white women—‘the nameless crime’—and murder” (Gibson). However, the sheer numbers of lynchings and recorded reasons for the alleged vigilantism do not bear out this claim. “The accusations against persons lynched, according to the Tuskegee Institute records for the years 1882 to 1951, were:41 per cent for felonious assault, 19.2 per cent for rape, 6.1 per cent for attempted rape, 4.9 per cent for robbery and theft, 1.8 per cent for insult to white persons, and 22.7 per cent for miscellaneous offenses or no offense at a 11.5 In the last category are all sorts of trivial ‘offenses’ such as ‘disputing with a white man,’ attempting to register to vote, ‘unpopularity’, self-defense, testifying against a white man, ‘asking a white woman in marriage’, and ‘peeping in a window’” (Gibson). Clearly the stereotype perpetuated by the sick misplaced sense of avenging women from black men who wanted to rape them is not accurate or justified. While women may do well to be careful around any man they do not know, just because the man in question is black does not mean there is any more likelihood of her being raped than if the man in question is of any other racial group. In fact, this stereotype may linger in such a way as to have caused some young black men to try to live up to the virility “standard” set by the stereotype and others similar to it. In what T. Elon Dancy describes as an ongoing study he is conducting on Black manhood in college, he found that young men feel “social expectations to be overly sexual, overly aggressive and athletic in college. Most study participants claimed or suggested that the stereotypical yet dominant images of Black men in media, particularly in television and movies, are linked to these pressures“(Dancy). After all, black men were once lynched because they allegedly could not control their sexual urges, so surely that means that their descendents are also overtly and overly sexed. However, without these images, young black men might find themselves unsure of where they fit in society. Eric Anderson and Mark McCormack explain the danger of trying to change the way people think about stereotyped groups too quickly and without a satisfactory replacement categorization. “While people are often socially marginalized by these identity categorizations, intellectually discarding them serves only to further alienate members of these groups. Accordingly, however offensive these stereotypes may be, it is important to recognize that they are reified by dominant discourse, self-segregation, and self-surveillance; and they have a material impact on peoples’ lives” (Anderson and McCormack 952). Stereotypes may have a lot to do with establishing expectations for young black men. If they believe that society expects them to be rap stars or basketball players, that is what they will strive to be. Imagine the extreme disappointment and the damage to self-esteem that must be the result when those societal expectations are not met. Sports and rap music are commonly viewed as a way out of poverty for young black men, and not just by the black community. Considering the competition in both areas, it is a dangerous stereotype to promote, and certainly does not serve young black males well. This stereotype, widespread in society, also comes from an unreliable source. “Black men’s sporting subjugation is long and complex. In a slave owning society, Black men were forced to participate for the pleasure of White audiences and the profit of White owners” (Anderson and McCormack 956). In many ways, this is still the case. One has only to think about the current NBA lockout. Most of the players, who the owners are denying a pay increase, are black. The owners are not black and they “own” these players, or at least the rights to their playing basketball. The players are talented enough to deserve several million dollars per year salaries, but not raises according to the owners.Now that they have decided to protest and demand a bigger share of the take, the owners have locked them out so they cannot play at all. When they are not playing, they are not making money. Internet news sites are full of sad stories of talented young NBA players who are going bankrupt, losing their homes and cars because they cannot do the job they were hired to do. Many people draw a parallel between the wealthy land owners and the team owners and slaves or tenant sharecroppers of the time before the Civil Rights era and NBA players. True, the players are rich men, but not all of them and they are all dependent upon the owner’s whims. Even the stereotype that says young black men are all rich basketball players is incorrect. All of these unfavorable or unrealistic stereotypes of the black men indicate that there is a shortage of outstanding Black men, which is not true. The majority of black men want to change the statistics and try hard to do so. Ian Evans says that “Black men have to defend themselves every day at institutions of higher learning, the workplace and in their communities” (Evans). Black men fill the roles of fathers, brothers, sons, husbands, uncles, and grandparents in families and communities throughout the country. The most powerful man in the world is a black man, and the leading Republican contender who would challenge him for that position is also black. Barrack Obama and Herman Cain refute the stereotypes of black men and other black men successfully and consistently fulfill these responsibilities every day and for all of their lives. There are others too: Neil Degrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium; Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice; Colin Powell served as Secretary of State from 2001-2005; his son, Mike Powell, was head of the FCC; Philipp Emeagwali is an expert in mathemathics, physics, and astronomy; and Mark Dean worked for IBM and helped to make computers operate faster. All of these men, and millions more not so educated or famous are successful family men, employers or employees, upright, law-abiding citizens, but that is not the image that society has of the black man, and this must change. Without society behind them, expecting young black men to live up to their potential rather than to fulfill a stereotype that is most likely based on racist and inaccurate information, those negative images cannot be forgotten. Young black men cannot move on to more positive roles in society, and this is not good for anyone. The events and attitudes that have generated the negative images that have resulted in the persistent harmful stereotypes need to be taught for what they are: ways to keep black men in subjugation. The truth about racism and its perseverance must be recognized, condemned and prosecuted. People who practice this type of bigotry must become the negative stereotype and that includes the police officers who repeatedly racially profile, make false accusations, and generally treat young black men as criminals whether or not they are. This sort of prejudice is the most heinous and should not be tolerated any longer. Those who ignore this behavior, look the other way, or even encourage it should also be prosecuted. Along with racial profiling in law enforcement, the exploitation and racist images in the media should be examined. Ways to change the image of the young black man as thug must be employed. People like Barrack Obama, Herman Cain, and Neil Degrasse Tyson serve as great examples. The success that they represent should be offered as the norm, not as the exception. Otherwise, the problems plaguing black men will not only continue to grow worse for that segment of the population, but for everyone. People must stop stereotyping based on what they have heard about others and let their own experiences govern their relationships to other people. Brent Staples wrote about it 25 years ago, but not much has changed. However, it must change because doing away with the negative stereotypes is the only way to have a truly equitable and peaceful world. Works Cited Anderson, Eric and Mark McCormack. "Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and American Sporting Oppression: Examining Black and Gay Male Athletes." Journal of Homosexuality, 57:949–967, 2010 57 (2010): 949-967. Dancy, T. Elon. "Black Men on Campus: What the Media Do Not Show Us." Diverse: Issues in Higher Education 25.26 (2009): Academic Search Premier. Accessed November 9, 2011. Dottolo, Andrea L. and Abigail J. Stewart. ""Don't Ever Forget Now, You're a Black Man in America": Intersections of Race, Class and Gender In Encounters with Police." Sex Roles 59 (2008): 350–364. Evans, Ian. "Gentlemen of Quality." Black Collegian 40.1 (2009): Academic Search Premier. Accessed November 9, 2011. Gibson, Robert A. "The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880- 1950." 2011. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. 10 November 2011 . Harper, Shaun R. "Niggers no more: a critical race counternarrative on Black male student achievement at predominantly White colleges and universities." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22.6 (2009): 697–712. Maddux, Michael. "‘Racist’ cop in civil-rights rap." New York Post 18 October 2011: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/staten_island/racist_cop_in_civil_rights_rap_Qb81k kyThIaPxlSZrf835J. Staples, Brent. "Black Men and Public Spaces." 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Samuel Cohen. 1986, 2011. 383-386. Wendt, Simon. "‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era." Gender and History 19.3 (2007 ): 543–564. Read More