The Facts in Black & White

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.