Just for fun, one recent rainy afternoon when everyone was
stuck indoors, I set out on a sociological experiment here on the unit. In an effort to explore racial stereotypes, I
walked around asking people to complete the following sentence: “All black (or white) people….” Regardless of race or ethnicity, each person was asked to complete both sentences.
You may be thinking, that’s a risky thing to do, but I’m on good terms
with most of the guys by now. I think they
see me as an open-minded person, essentially harmless, a friend to many and
fair to all, etc. Even so, I avoided the
most virulently and openly nasty racists, because I didn’t want to stir up real
trouble. I went about my mission in the
spirit of that old Eddie Murphy skit where he went undercover as a white man
(you can look it up on them Googles).
So, for your reading pleasure, the results of my experiment: The Facts of Life in Black and White.
All Black People:
Play basketball, are drug dealers, hate to blow their noses
(weirdly, in prison this one appears to be sort of true), love horror movies,
think Tyler Perry is a true comedic savant, are loud, think they can rap, yell
at the tv during a movie, like big butts (…and they cannot lie…), and drink
orange/grape soda exclusively.
All White People:
Pretend to like Tyler Perry, think liking Tiger Woods proves
they are not racist, are rich, like to watch 60 Minutes on tv, somehow believe
they could survive in the woods (like on one of those Discovery channel shows),
can’t dance, can’t jump, can’t really play basketball, will take medicine for
anything and everything, whether they need it or not (again, in prison, appears
to be sort of true), think Ellen is better than Oprah, think they understand
the stock market, and bought their drugs from black guys, but act like they
weren’t criminals themselves.
Some of these answers made me laugh, some made me think, and
others just had me scratching my head. I
guess we could have launched into a deep discussion about these stereotypes, but we
didn’t. You know what we did? We laughed.
Hard. We laughed because even as
people came up with these comparisons, they knew they weren’t really true. And sometimes just taking a step back, not
taking ourselves and our attitudes so seriously, is a good thing (especially
here in prison). After all, life is
hard. Prison makes it harder. But we don’t need to amplify all that by
taking everything so seriously. Happy Thanksgiving! Peace out.
