Stereotypes & cultural evangelism- Reaction #1
I am a little wary of doing this, but I am going to try posting my reaction papers for the History of Multicultural Education online, slightly modified as they are pretty personal. For the class we are reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith and I will often refer to that novel as such.
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In my class, a white student commented that being surrounded by “brownness” sounded better, more comforting than being surrounded by “whiteness.” What I thought about that comment is that we associate “brownness” with people in touch with their ethnicity, which means family-oriented, fun, social, happy, laughing, food, togetherness, a little bit of loudness. Being surrounded by “whiteness” sounds sterile, serious, soccer-momish, prim & proper, “how do you dos”– without really meaning it, self-consciousness, eating pork chops with a fork and knife. What I associate whiteness with is assimilation, a blankness about identity, being assimilated into a “civilized” world where we don’t let our identity offend others. But what we were talking about yesterday morning doesn’t have to do with skin color, it has to do with social class and how we’ve been taught to associate class with color. A “rough” neighborhood, is being called that because it’s poor, impoverished, downtrodden—but how many of us also imagine that the “rough” neighborhood also contains people of color? It’s notable that we were talking about being surrounded by brownness, instead of being surrounded by “blackness” and I have no doubt that this is intentional.
In White Teeth, Samad laments the process that has led to the merging of cultures into a massive assimilation: “I don’t know what’s happening to our children…they won’t go to mosque, they don’t pray, they speak strangely, they dress strangely, they eat all kinds of rubbish…no respect for tradition. People call it assimilation when it is nothing but corruption.” (159). But it’s also oversimplifying to say that race isn’t a part of how the assimilated are perceived. In White Teeth, the word “coconut” is used to talk about the immigrants who aren’t Muslim enough, who seem too white on the inside. Those characters are not accepted by Muslims for being too white, or mainstream British culture for being too brown. That is the ultimate question—how to assist people in understanding the ways of the mainstream, without losing touch with the community and family who connect them to their own identity.
September 10th, 2004 at 11:19 pm
Sorry grandma! I absolutely meant to speak in sweeping generalizations about stereotypes. When someone had commented that one sounded more comforting than the other, I thought about how we are conditioned to think about those things. I don’t even consider them politically correct…they are purely constructed by many factors, particularly mass media. And I do think that this is where race and class become intertwined. My family doesn’t represent this concept of whiteness described above, but I can feel that I have experienced that kind of atmosphere in upper middle class society and expectations of that world. This is absolutely about the stereotypes that come to mind when people think about race. And it’s funny, I was just talking to someone the other day who was saying exactly the same thing as you, which is that there are people in every race, culture, religion etc who are jerks, who are nice, who love their families, who despise their families, who commit crimes etc.