Curious
The bear and I were watching a show that was discussing racial stereotypes briefly. The “Asians can’t drive” stereotype came up, and I had to profess ignorance. That was one I had never heard. The bear told me he’d heard that one plenty of times before, and since it was a stereotype that made it onto national television, I had to assume plenty of other people were aware of that one.
After thinking about it some, I went to google up some statistics, and got a better picture of what I think was going on. I grew up in an area with a surprisingly large immigrant population (albeit unsurprisingly segregated). There is a distinctly large Asian population here, but it’s comprised overwhelmingly of a very few ethnicities, generally not Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I only bring that up because I know that in my mind, when I think “Asian” and don’t investigate the thought further, I generally think of some undifferentiated compendium of “ChineseJapaneseKorean.” I don’t think of Southeast Asian. If you were to ask me, “Are Thais Asian?” I’d say yes, but if you were to ask me, “What is Asian?” I’d probably say Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and might not remember the rest of the Asian world unless prompted. Admittedly, maybe that is just my brain. But it made me wonder if the “Asian people can’t drive” stereotype didn’t really take root here because the most identifiably Asian population in my hometown isn’t necessarily considered “Asian” at first glance.
There is also a sizable [redacted] African population here. In my hometown, it’s the Africans who can’t drive. It’s also the Africans who are “taking all the jobs” and “can’t take care of their kids” and “run down the neighborhoods” and “talk way too loud.” The first, second, and third of those assumptions never really took root in me for some reason, possibly because I grew up in a neighborhood with a very diverse mix of immigrants, and got to actually see immigrants working extremely hard (usually in jobs white people would never take), caring lovingly for their children, and tending their homes and lawns way better than my father ever did. In fact, the city was called on my house several times, and the police a few times, due to our general slovenliness and perceived threat of violence to the neighbors, so I’m pretty sure we were the ones bringing the neighborhood down, and not the Laotion guys who lived down the street.
The talk too loud stereotype and the bad driving stereotype did take root, though. I know they did, because whenever somebody is talking very loudly near me, or is speeding recklessly, in the split-second before I turn my head to look at them, this chime goes off in my head that says, “I bet they’re going to be black.” Anybody in my town with dark skin shares the same stereotypical space in my brain — if they’re speeding and talking loud, they’ve got to be African or African-American.
I didn’t used to notice this when I was a kid. In fact, I didn’t notice it until I went to a different town for college. That town had a very different demographic make-up, with a very small immigrant population, and an absolutely dismal proportion of African-Americans, who were nonetheless even more segregated. This escaped my notice entirely for about a year of college, until one day I was on the bus and I saw a Nigerian man. And I stared. I stared before I caught myself staring, and, horrified, forced myself to stare at my shoes the rest of the ride, asking myself what the fuck was wrong with me. It finally occurred to me — you haven’t seen somebody who isn’t white for almost an entire year. I stopped wondering what was wrong with me, and started wondering what was wrong with this town, and this college. And then I went back to wondering what was wrong with me, that I had never noticed this in all the college materials.
In that town, African-Americans couldn’t drive, and African-Americans spoke too loud. There wasn’t really any other ethnicity available to share that stereotypical space.
Now that I’m back in my hometown, I take note of it every time my brain clicks and whirs and spits out, “That shitty driver is going to be black.” I take note of the fact that, if they are black, my brain wants to file that away in a box called “Told you so, blacks are shitty drivers,” whereas if they turn out to be white or any other ethnicity, my brain wants to file that away in a box called, “What a shitty driver, moving along.” I really force myself to notice that I’m doing this, and sometimes I force myself to say it out loud — “I assumed that woman was going to be Somali because she was loud, and then when she was Somali, I felt smug.” (I do not say this out loud in front of the person I am pigeon-holing — I say it out loud just for myself, or sometimes in front of my bear.)
It feels really icky to say that shit out loud, to hear what I’m saying. I do it that way because my ex-friend Polar once went off on a racist rant, and hearing that shit said out loud made me realize how few places you have to hide racism anymore, once you’ve taken it outside your head and put it in public. Once I say, out loud, “I felt smug because a black person was loud, the way I expect them to be,” there is no way for me to chock that up to anything else. With Polar, she went on a rant with me about a solicitor who came to her house on an obvious pyramid scheme about flipping properties. Solicitors suck, and pyramid schemes suck, so I understood her fuming about how shitty it was and how angry it made her, thinking about how that solicitor was probably just going to go next door and scam some old person. I got that. But she just wouldn’t stop talking about it, and seemed to get angrier and angrier the more she talked. I don’t know what clicked it for me, something in the tone of her voice, but I finally asked, “What race was the guy?” And thus opened up a new wing of the conversation, called “Fucking Africans.” I wasn’t yet at the point in my life where I was willing to shut somebody down cold, and end a friendship with them over a major breach in goddamn ethics. So I tried having a “rational” conversation with her about how maybe, just throwing this out there, maybe that situation wasn’t any worse just because he was Africans. Maybe it sucks to have a solicitor try to scam you, no matter what race they are. And maybe we should stop talking about how he’s a fucking African who you can’t even understand the way he talks hurfle burfle racist puke, and just move on to talking about something else, okay?
I finally accidentally shut down the conversation when Polar, getting increasingly backed into a corner, tried this one: “It’s not even what he was doing that bothered me! It’s just that he came to this country and took somebody else’s job!” Without thinking about it, I burst into laughter. “Oh, the coveted ‘scam old people all day’ job? That’s a tight fucking market, how dare he take that job away from some sad white dude who has to work in an office with benefits now that the pyramid scheme is all sewn up.” I was being really generous at the time, all “oh, she’s just venting, I should help educate her” instead of “racism makes white people believe completely insane things and I am not going to entertain this conversation as if it is sane or reasonable.”
I’m getting really off track here. What I meant to say about all of this: there are a collection of racist stereotypes that I know intimately, but where I have grown up, they’ve been applied to completely different groups of people. If I hadn’t heard that “Asians can’t drive” thing on TV, I never would have even considered the fact that perhaps in other parts of the country, Africans aren’t the bad drivers. Perhaps in other parts of the country, all the same stereotypes just get applied to the local demographic whipping boy. And I got curious about that. I started to wonder what other hometowns look like, how this process works everywhere — take a stereotype and stick it to whoever your town values the least. If anybody is comfortable sharing, I’d like to know who is the loud bad driver in your town. What ethnicity fills the slot of (any given stereotype)? I’m less interested in the ethnicities than I am in the stereotypes, since I suspect we’ll end up with a static list of stereotypes, and a rotating cast of characters to fill them. I’m interested in this because it’s like a Mad Libs of goddamn horrible oppression: pick some characteristic that white people, as a society, have decided is an accurate indicator of a person’s unfitness for citizenship (which is its own insane judgment to start with), and then just fill in the blank with whoever your most visible local non-white ethnicity is. Like, if I put out there: The worst drivers in my town are (ethnicity), and ask a local white person to fill in the blank, I probably now have a fairly accurate judgment of the demographics of their town.
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Well, we go with one of four…
Bad drivers are a)Asian, b)on the phone, c)out-of-province (usually Albertan), or d)old.
Subset of a) is female and Asian.
I never really hear the “taking all our jobs” line. Maybe that’s because so many of the people who immigrate here are under-employed while they wait for their training/certifications to be upgraded or accepted. Or because I live in a medium-to-high socio-economic group, so the jobs of my peers aren’t affected by the existence of new-and-nearly-new immigrants working in low-income fields. Or because we’re such a young city, with such a high percentage of diversity in our population that “ownership” of the area by any one group is much more disputable.
I have never associated, or heard associated, voice volume with race.
Gang violence brings up a number of competing stereotypes… East Indian(mostly local), Asian (Triad and related), and Caucasian (Hell’s Angels, and a few others) are the three that spring to mind.
Alcoholism, drug abuse and poor parenting are frequently associated with the First Nations reserve communities. And with poverty in general… high poverty areas carry that stigma regardless of racial composition.
On an interesting and related note… if two women bring their children into the doctor with the same set of symptoms, but one is lower class aboriginal and one is white upper middle class, the aboriginal woman’s child will be diagnosed as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. The white woman’s child will be diagnosed as ADHD. Part of that is from stereotype, part of it is from the fact that the aboriginal communities here have acknowledged the problem of alcohol and drug abuse on the reserves and, while working to combat it, are also more willing to examine it. But a large number of pregnancies, including those in the “privileged” sector of society, are unplanned… and if you aren’t aware of your pregnancy, you continue to act, drink, and socialize as normal. The fact that you may have harmed your child, even totally accidentally and in complete innocence, is really hard to accept. ADHD is a much easier diagnosis to swallow. (Above information from materials handed out by the FASD outreach program in my area.)
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…..where I live it’s snowbirds and people from California who are bad drivers. I am not really sure what this says. I can’t think of any other stereotypes, really, possibly because I’m over here in the sheltered white upper middle class corner.
Oh, wait, there’s the “Mexicans are taking all our jobs and need to learn to speak goddamn English” thing. Because I live in southern Arizona and there are a lot of Mexican immigrants. Which is apparently background noise to much a degree that I didn’t even think of it, eek.
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Where I’m from, Asians were always said to be the bad drivers. Latinos were the criminals and gang members, and African Americans were the loud ones and the drug addicts.
Which is all actually really funny (not ha-ha, but ridiculous), because almost every white kid I knew did drugs (and engaged in various other forms of criminal activity) and got in at least one car wreck that they caused.
I like your idea about saying those icky thoughts out loud. I did that just yesterday: I said out loud to someone a thought I’d had about a woman because she was fat (explaining that I was ashamed of having had the thought), and I felt thoroughly disgusted with myself. I don’t like to admit I have bigoted thoughts of any variety, but it’s awfully hard to combat bigotry if I’m not even honest with myself. I think I’m going to make a habit of that: saying those thoughts out loud, or writing them down, the better to examine them and eradicate them from my knee-jerk thinking. Thank you very much for being brave enough to be honest and for offering the suggestion.
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Huh, just realized something weird about living in NYC: most New Yorkers don’t drive and all drivers are evil to pedestrians, ergo, so far as I know there’s no bad drivers stereotype in NYC. Legitimately, I cannot recall in my life ever hearing someone ascribe bad driving to someone’s race. ah, except taxi cabs – which, hmm, I wonder. Taxi drivers in NYC definitely tend to be ethnic minorities, and also often immigrants. They’re maybe mostly Middle Eastern, Latino, and African or African American? I don’t really know. But I’ve never heard someone connect the, um, brash driving style considered typical of taxi cabs to a racial thing, it always stops at “fuckin cabs!”
Also, Jersey drivers, NYC people really fucking hate Jersey drivers (who are mostly white), no idea why.
I don’t know, maybe it’s because I move a lot, or because I commuted to school and thus never had much of a feel of a “neighborhood,” or maybe I’m just clueless (I didn’t know about the “black people can’t swim” stereotype till I read about it online somewhere), I *think* the stereotypes I’m familiar with are pretty common (as in, I see them on TV so I assume they’re not just an NYC thing):
-black people being loud
-Asian people being good at math
-black people being more athletic/better dancers than white people
-Asian people being nerdy
-black men are scary
-…I think that’s it? like, I’ve heard individuals saying random things about various ethnic groups but not in a particularly consistent way. Hm. Maybe I’m just out of it.
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I live in a very small unincorporated township in Virginia (maybe 450 people in the area the post office considers to be part of it, but around 150 of us in the “core” area as it were). Here, African-Americans are loud and lazy, and women are the horrible drivers.
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Interesting. Because my town has a large Asian population who are very educated and considered to be all honors students (hard on those who aren’t). And although I would assume 52% of us are female, the stereotype is that women are the bad drivers. I have never heard that Asians should be bad drivers. And the Nigerian and African American “bad section” of town doesn’t bring up bad driving. We all think Nigerians are unbelievably hard-working. But we do think that crime and drugs use and sales are centered in the African American section(where Nigerians choose not to live). This is true, per police stats. Is it racist? Is it less racist if I know that it is a very poor area as well? What is racism in this context? Sometimes I don’t even know how to approach these concepts in relation to groups of which I am not a member.
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Where I grew up (white pretty much without exception), in the absence of any minority ethnicity the bad drivers were automatically assumed to be women.
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The only one I can think of for worst drivers is old people and teenagers, but of course statistics back me up on those, and they’re attributable to actual things (slower reflexes and pure utter insanity, respectively).
I used to live in Oklahoma, where it was absolutely the “Mexicans,” meaning anyone Spanish-speaking. I think it was vaguely related to being “close” to the border, and a perception that “they” were stealing “our” jobs, and not even learning English (like half the people in Oklahoma don’t speak intelligible English…). It blew me away though; I had moved around a lot and as such not grown up with this casual view that “Mexicans” were somehow lesser than and irritating. People either didn’t believe me or were horrified when pointed it out. The latter group tried to change, and I was always really happy about that.
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Wow, that is a totally new stereotype to me. Well, in terms of race. I’ve always thought of it as primarily a sexist assumption.
Growing up, the prevalent stereotype was that women were bad drivers. So much so that “Crazy women drivers!” was a cartoon catchphrase. At some point, the sexist assumption became tempered with some kind of accessory, so that instead of men just saying “Stupid women can’t drive,” and leaving it at that, there would be some kind of corollary, like, “Must be putting on her lipstick,” or “Probably talking on her damn cell phone.”
“Old people” are also the default “bad drivers.” I hear lots of people saying things like “Get off the road, grandma,” or whatever. I catch myself doing it too, yelling something like “step on it, papaw” when stuck behind an older model of car going slowly.
On the racist tip though I must just be unplugged, because i’ve lived all over the place (large cities, small towns, both coasts and the midwest) and have never heard this “asians are bad drivers” thing.
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In my hometown, there’s a specific minority whose population has grown significantly in recent years. Common wisdom around here holds that they (1) are terrible drivers because their assumed country of origin has looser traffic laws, (2) have poor hygeine, (3) are dangerous because they are contemptuous of white people and are more likely to express this contempt through violence, and (4) have terrible manners.
I’ve been working to counteract these knee-jerk perceptions in my own mind. I really like your say-it-aloud idea–I’m definitely going to use it!
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To add to your data, I’m from the UK. Specifically, I grew up in Essex and now live in Oxford. As far as I’ve encountered, we don’t stereotype driving by race. We do stereotype women as bad drivers – mostly in the form of “jokes”, rather than ranting in all seriousness. Old men get similar treatment but with the balance shifted the other way: more serious complaints, fewer jokes.
Taking up your analysis, perhaps in the UK we are constituting poor driving as a consequence of general feebleness, rather than being about fitness for citizenship and (hence) race.
For myself, if somebody is driving badly there are two preconceptions I have which I’m smug when they’re true: (1) a taxi (2) a BMW.
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[redacted]
I haven’t noticed particular stereotypes around either group, but I didn’t grow up here, and I suspect that’s when a person is most likely to absorb that kind of thing. My neighbor across the street did say something once, but it was a negative comment about black people in general, not Africans in particular, and I don’t remember what it was, I just remember thinking “oookay, so you’re a racist and you think it’s normal to be one.” Though come to think of it, I bet he doesn’t think he’s racist at all.
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Thank you for posting this. I hadn’t realised it, but I was doing the same thing – look at the other vehicle and realise I was “right” if it was a) an asian, or b) a redneck in a truck.
So I looked up the city I grew up in on the census site (I’m Canadian). I grew up a 5 minute walk from Chinatown, in a primarily white neighbourhood. Chinese is our largest visible minority group, at about 6.7% of the total pop, but in 2006 just under 25% of the city identified themselves on the survey as belonging to a visible minority.
Now that I’m aware I’ve been doing it, I am going to have to work on it though. I can’t just say “I’m not racist, my best friend is Chinese”… as that statement smacks of white privilege too.
But what do I do about the “redneck in a truck” half of the equation?
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I live in central NJ, which is a area that is in serious ethnic transition, so our racist sterotypes are changing quickly, too. When I was growing up, it was women who couldn’t drive (because there were only white people). Then it was the Chinese, and now it’s Indians. We have the Mexican sterotypes, but they are all about how they will do any kind of awful work for cheap, not about driving. The block I live on, with about 8 houses, has changed from all white 5 years ago to 6 out of 8 either Chinese or Indian. There is some serious “white flight” going on, as our Little India area expands, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my whole neighborhood was non-white entirely in another 5 years. We really like our new neighbors, as they are all young families with kids, as are we.
Anyway, that is what is going on around here.
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If someone is being a shithead on the highway, I usually assume it’s a redneck in a truck with a gun rack and a “liberal hunting permit” bumper sticker. But that’s more because I associate a certain type of white male with overt, scary aggressiveness and entitlement.
However, I think the general stereotype here (Austin, TX) is that if you’re driving a shitty car (not necessarily driving it shittily, just driving a piece of junk), you are probably Mexican (the catch-all for any Spanish speaking individual), probably don’t speak much English, and probably here illegally. And I have to admit that even though I just taught The Devil’s Highway in my class and spent hours discussing the virtues of hard-working immigrants and the hell they have to go through to get here, I find myself making assumptions (“probably here illegally,” “probably doesn’t speak English”) when I see a group of brown guys in an old, beat up truck. I hate that my mind goes there.
On a side note, the Asian community in my area is pretty tiny and sort of segregated (they have their own grocery stores, churches, community centers, etc.) and therefore sort of invisible to the white population, which is weird for my half-Japanese husband. His features don’t read “Asian” to most white people, so some people at the school he teaches at assumes that because he’s brown, he obviously speaks Spanish and probably a host of other things they don’t say out loud. When he stated that he was bi-lingual on his resume, the administrators assumed he spoke Spanish.
OH! I just remembered, if someone is hollering at a woman from their car window, I think alot of people assume that it’s a Latino. And, in fact, my sister was harassed on a roadway by a couple of Latino guys, which led to a “Fucking Mexicans” conversation in which I was like “you go to an all-white school where dudes think it’s cool to grab your ass and talk about your tits in the hallway, how is this a racial issue?”
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I think the redneck bit is more about classism than racism (though you can’t ever fully separate the two). As in, “I feel smug because I expected that driver to be an uneducated lower-class white man, which means to me that he’s white trash. I feel smug because I have classified a human being as a piece of trash based on their apparent poverty, assumed education level, and the fact that they don’t use their turn signal.”
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Well, it’s obviously a racial issue. Mexicans coming over here, taking all the good street harassment tactics away from real American men!
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I grew up in northern BC. Most of the population there was white, with a large minority of First Nations. There was a sprinkling of various Asian ethnicities, and one (one!) black family who stayed less than a year.
The bad driver stereotype was women, the slow driver stereotype was old. (They obviously never met my grandparents, both of whom were once (amateur) race car drivers, and still drove like it.)
We didn’t have a loud talker or criminal stereotype, but First Nations folks were broadly painted with the lazy, drunk stereotype. This despite the fact that groups of young native men would drive from door to door (rural area) looking for farm or labourer work. Hard, back-breaking, low-paying work, I might add.
And this stereotype persisted despite the fact that most of the whites in the area were also poor or working class ourselves, and most everyone I grew up with (primarily white) has drinking/drug problems, relationship problems, trouble keeping a job, or been in trouble with the law. (There are certainly exceptions.) Harriet’s stories about life before bear are, well, familiar to me.
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I live in Austin, Texas like Ashley, but more than that I live in MY OWN HEAD, and I think I may have lost track of what others who live here think.
I equate POOR DRIVING with BEING MALE (having to dominate, trying to “prove” masculinity by unsafe driving, thinking that you are more important and that your needs are more pressing than everyone else on the road) and particularly with YOUNG males. So does my husband, even though he is male. Often my husband will make comments like: “His penis must be ENORMOUS!” when witnessing crappy driving.
Talks too loud: no particular stereotype comes to mind
Taking Our Jobs: People Overseas, particularly in China
Are Criminals: All Poor People, except Mexicans
Are Scary: Black Men younger than 60
Around here, Mexican-Americans are perceived in large part as being good citizens and good parents, and there is little disapprobation if a son or daughter chooses to marry into the Mexican-American community, and NONE if the Latin@ is college-educated. I think poor whites are seen as LOWER on the Caste ladder, because poor whites are thought to be bad parents and have drug problems/be losers.
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I grew up in a small university town in Washington state. The “bad drivers” there women or Asian.
Any time a girl or woman was harassed on the street there, people assume the harasser was Mexican. When I was twelve I started walking to school and got harassed by Mexican men every morning. The thing that I didn’t acknowledge at the time was that I had been walking by a canning factory that employed mostly Mexican workers. I *did* get harassed by men of all sorts in that town but since I had been hearing about those “pervy old Mexican men” I had been cataloguing the harassment in my head differently. Walking to/from school was the usually the only time I was alone (i.e. a better target). When I was sexually assaulted, the target of an attempted sexual assault, or abduction the creeps were all white but I never made broad angry generalizations about white men.
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I hate to say it, Dee, but where I live, in a state next door? If you see a bad driver, he always has a Washington license plate. ALWAYS. (A parenthetical to indicate that I am saying this in good fun. Good fun! But no, it’s totally true.)
That said (and to get back to the topic at hand), I hold that criticizing a person based on his or her race/sexual identity/religion/gender/nationality is about the intellectually laziest thing a person can do. Ninety percent of the time what you’re really saying is, “I dislike this person because of some actual personality flaw, but frankly, I don’t have time or energy to go into it. Therefore: Damn ______.” The rest of the time, it’s this kind of brain-dead drivel: “I heard that black people steal? And I saw this black person? And I felt like he would steal from me. And that’s why I don’t like the black people.”
Infuriating. I wish more people would do the not-all-that-difficult work of thinking through their beliefs, but then, I suppose there’s a lot of TV to watch too.
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I grew up in Portland, OR and spent a lot of time in Eastern Oregon, where the majority of my extended family lives.
The vast majority of racist comments I’ve heard were about Hispanics. The stereotypes are really varied, but the bare elements I’ve heard are “loud, lazy, wife-beating alcoholics that have lots and lots of kids.” I used to hear the line about “All ‘dem Mexicans are stealin’ our jobs” but I haven’t heard it in a couple years. The two Asian stereotypes in this area are that they are slow drivers and that they are really really smart. Where I live now (in a university, college town) I don’t find really any racism, which is good. But everytime I leave to visit Eastern Oregon, I’m thrown back into the racism cesspool.
Basically, the target of racist stereotyping in my community (Eastern OR) is hispanic families.
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Washington state where everyone just knows that black women are loud, black men drive fancy cars and live in neglected houses, slow drivers are old, and negligent drivers are a tie between women and Asians.
I just came back from Honolulu (visiting my son) where everyone knows that the only people who drive worse than the tourists are the locals.
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I grew up in Gallup, New Mexico, on the border of three of the largest Indian reservations in the U.S., and close enough to Mexico that Hispanics were the majority, and it was the “Navajos” who were the bad drivers (none of the other tribes, just the Navajo)
That town was such a bizarre racial anomaly, though. Hispanics and whites and the other, less populous Native American tribes, i.e. the Hopi and the Zuni, kind of fused together to form their own privileged class who picked on the Navajo (incidentally, “Navajo” is actually a slur to the tribe that they’ve come to accept as their name), who on their own would have been the dominant demographic. THEN people from India began to move to town, and suddenly, it was the “Arabs” (because racist assholes rarely take the time to distinguish between different shades of brown) who were the problem.
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: It’s entirely possible that our experiences of Texas culture are different. I’m right there with you on the male drivers thing…not sure why my head goes to the “THAT ASSHOLE PROBABLY VOTED FOR BUSH AND KILLS WOODLAND CREATURES” place.
However, while alot of people may SAY what you said about Latin@s, I’ve seen nastier things come out of people, especially when they’re pissed. One example is my sister’s reaction to being harassed on the street. My high school boyfriend was half Mexican and had some unpleasant stories about things that were said to him on the football or soccer field by guys who were pissed at him for something. One time when he was getting agressive during soccer practice, a teammate came at him with all kinds of racist invective about Latinos having uncontrollable tempers. Then I saw one of my mother’s good friends go off because a Wal-Mart in her area was now exclusively catering to Spanish-speakers. I’m fairly certain, however, that if you asked any of these people now, they would say that Latin@s are hard workers and have good family values. The point of Harriet’s post seemed to be that repressed feelings come to the surface in moments of frustration and anger, sentiments we wouldn’t express under less heated circumstances because we know they’re “wrong.”
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Actually, they are probably not poor – they drive $40K trucks, have reasonable disposable income, education opportunities, and choose to behave like loudmouthed, obnoxious morons.
For background, I live in a middle class bedroom community with white collar, blue-collar foreman/supervisor types (lots of company trucks around), and also people who commute up north for 10 or 20 day stretches in the oilpatch. I say “rednecks” because of their behaviour and attitudes (bumper stickers proclaiming “no to gun control”, global warming denial) rather than their apparent income levels. That hadn’t occurred to me.
Redneck here isn’t really about poverty or education – I know engineers who I would call rednecks. It was a poor choice of word on my part, as I didn’t think about the US definition and regional stereotypes associated.
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I live in Atlanta where Mexicans are taking jobs, having too many children, dress too sexy, do not speak English & cannot drive. Where black people are too loud, have children too young, are criminals in general & love living off of the system,.
As far as I know, there aren’t any widely circulated local stereotypes for/about Asians, other than what you would see on tv (foreign, smart, quiet)
The first place I heard “Asians can’t drive” was many years ago on the radio show “Loveline” which was based in California.
I say we have so many shitty drivers b/c everyone is from some where else
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some where else meaning other cities, not other countries specifically.
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Wait, are you saying that people from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the DR, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, plus Native American/First Nations don’t all look the same?!
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Okay, making that list depressed me. Because there are so many people who really do look at all of those people and just see “brown”. Also all those people are either dirty Arabs/Muslims or dirty Spanish-speakers. Yes, even the Indian Hindus. They’re very talented, being Arab and Indian and Muslim and Hindu all at once.
*Oh, sorry, and the native “Indians” in Latin America.
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The only one I can think of for worst drivers is old people and teenagers, but of course statistics back me up on those, and they’re attributable to actual things (slower reflexes and pure utter insanity, respectively).
The teen driver risk is probably misrepresented. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death for teens, but in terms of the per-100,000 they actually die in accidents less often than is the American average, and the top bracket for dying in auto accidents belongs, weirdly, to people ages 45-49. I don’t trust the statistics about elderly people, because I can’t make WISQARS leave out the ones who don’t drive.
Anyhow, the fact that the top cause of teen death is auto accidents really just shows that they don’t die of heart disease and cancer very much. Those being the top causes for that 45-49 bracket who die in auto accidents more than any other age group.
WISQARS is this statistic-organizing widget on the CDC’s site. Anybody can play with it. I am a freak and think this is fun, and regret it if I seem like I’m one-upping anybody.
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I am currently on vacation in a place where the demographics are the exact opposite of where I live, North Texas vs. Harlem, New York, so I’ve been thinking a lot about race and racial culture, if that is a term.
Last night, I went to see Precious, which is set in Harlem, and the people in the movie theatre were loud. But because I am visiting and not in my own environment, I was more able to appreciate how I take the way White people do a thing and then turn that into the proper way to do that thing. When, in fact, there is no proper way to see a movie or do most other things, obviously.
Also, I keep getting a lot of respect from my friends and family for being here, when I haven’t done anything and nothing remotely scary has happened. I think this is what it must feel like when men get props for babysitting there kids.
In my non-vacation life, I’m likely to comment on men being very emotional drivers, speeding up, cutting people off, etc. when they feel slighted by other drivers, and frat boys being rapists. Unlike other demographics, I can’t tell if that is a prejudice or represents reality.
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Oh, and the worst drivers, regardless of race, live in South Florida.
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Ashley: No Doubt you are right; I live in South Austin and I am SO SURE that those North Austin people are totally prejudiced!
HA HA HA No but seriously……
I think one thing about Texas is that the Mexicans were here FIRST, and some families have been here for two hundred years. Latinos are not a mysterious “other”. I know that in the 1950′s they were looked down on by whites very pointedly, but in my lifetime, a poor white person who lives in a trailer is FAR more looked down on than a Latin@ with a degree. Because if they are still poor AND they are white, they MUST be a fuck-up/alcoholic/crack addict, because they haven’t advanced even though the game is tilted in their favor.
I am really quite SHOCKED that so many areas are still identifying WOMEN as “the bad drivers”! That just seems so passe and disproven at this point. Who pays the highest car insurance? YOUNG MEN. Overall, aren’t women Much Safer drivers than men according to actuarial tables?
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I live in Auckland, New Zealand. We totally have the Asians = bad drivers myth. For a while there, throughout the 90s, I believe they were also the ones bemoaned for speaking loudly. I go to a cafe that has a Brazilian kitchen staff (chefs n shit), and just they other day I was having a conversation with someone who was saying holy shit they’re loud. I mean, they are kind of loud, but I was trying to explore the possibility that because we can’t understand it, we just hear the string of sound. Getting away from the point now. I will try to rein it in. The criminals, abusers, drug addicts etc are assumed to be Maori or Samoan (or other Polynesian people). The dairy- (=convenience store) owners and dodgy businessmen and violent people are assumed to be Indian.
Maori are hugely over-represented in rates of crime, last I looked at domestic violence stats, Maori came out at about half. That’s half of the crime rate of 4 million people that has a rough make up of 40-50% European (that means white, naturalised, of largely colonial descent, 15% Maori, 12% Asian, and then bits and bobs of Indian, Middle Eastern, Eastern European and English. And it may be because of the enormous cultural trauma they have undergone, y’know, having their land and the language and their culture forceably removed. The colonialists were generous enough to let then stay and not slaughter them as per the US and Australia (and others). Bully for them.
Getting back to the point (again, sorry, you’ve caught me on a Sunday when I have the time and inclination to ramble), another, more pernicious and harder to sort out reason that I think these communities are so over-represented is in part because of the stereotypes that abound surrounding certain ethnic groups. A big brown man in a beemer is far more likely to be pulled over than I am. Police are more likely to be called to domestic violence incidents in predominantly Maori and Polynesian areas, because in the middle class european communities they’re very concerned with keeping up appearances. I mean, all abuse is propogated within staunch and sticky veils of secrecy, but a white middle class man is going to have a far better whack at drawing on what he knows of his place in society and the bare minimum he has to do to avoid culpability for his behaviours and actions. Because the white man is the rational sensible trustworthy upstanding honourable DEFAULT beacon of glorious light emanating from the arsehole of a national ideology that dedicates more time to coverage of the rugby on the news at six than they do for the world segment and marginalises anyone not into rugby racing beer being hard not being soft not crying drinking beer fulfilling other hyper-masculine activities and attitudes. Phewf.
Anyway, I found it so fascinating reading other people’s mythic cultural stereotypical landscapes, so I thought i’d put mine down. Because NZ’s a weird little microcosm, patterns like this seem to leap into rude focus quite easily. But I guess that’s still only if you’re looking for them.
Depressing yet somewhat unsurprising and that the systems and patterns of constructing and maintaining dominance as a culture work the same, or very similarly across oppression genres and on macro- and micro- scales. Same shit, different bucket. And then I start squirming and not knowing what to do, what action to take to ensure that I am not continuing to propound these stereotypes. So I always notice in myself when I make one of those assumptions and I always take it apart in my head. But I haven’t said it out loud before. I may just try it next time.
You are very logical. Your stuff is uber-rad.
lex
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“their kids.” Sorry.
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Once upon a time, say, early ’90s, in or around San Jose, CA (very diverse area), I had a conversation with friends about bad driver stereotypes. We came up with what would be the sterotypically worst driver ever: an elderly, Asian, woman driver from Utah. (At least a couple of the people there were Mormon, and they agreed on the Utah thing – I’d never heard of that.) I’m having trouble remembering any other stereotypes that I’d have felt comfortable joking about like that – I’m sure there were others, but either I’d internalized them and didn’t notice, or I’d be offended by them and argue.
Around the same time I worked with a man who happened to be, um, Pakistani, I think. He also happened to be creeeeeeeeepy. For a long time after that, whenever I encountered any middle-eastern or Indian man, I’d feel creeped out and unsafe. I knew this was irrational and I got over it eventually, but it’s interesting that I reacted that way. I’d met plenty of other creepy guys of different ethnicities, and never developed any particular racist stereotypes in response to them. Was it because I’d not met many other people from that part of the world, so it was easier to form a stereotype based on one person? Was it because I had to spend so much time with him compared to those other creeps? Was there some unrecognized preconception I already had about “people like him”? I dunno.
Now I’m still in CA, but further north and inland, in a more rural area. It’s a lot, um, whiter than any place I’ve lived before, enough so that I give a little mental cheer when I see black people in town, seriously. I didn’t grow up here, so I don’t really know the local stereotypes. The largest minority here is probably Native Americans, but I don’t hear much about them, except maybe that they make so much money off those casinos they really should be paying more taxes. Cause, like, giving up a freaking continent and lots and lots of lives didn’t cover their share of the public burden. Or whatever.
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More on Harlem, please feel free to delete this if it’s too much of a thread jack.
Walking around Harlem, alone, at night, made me realize I feel exactly the same as when I walk around Dallas.
I don’t think I would feel safer if I were African-American, or if everyone here were white. I would feel a lot more comfortable though, statistically, if everyone were female.
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I’m from Oklahoma and yes, it’s the Mexicans who are the “problem.” They come and steal jobs and then do shitty work just to spite us, don’t you know? They’re gangsters and drug dealers, too, and any place they congregate is infested with criminal activity.
Black people are stereotypically thought to be poor and low-class with too many kids by too many daddies. Never poor, of course, for any reason but their own shiftlessness and poor work history, what with either being pregnant (women) or in and out of prison (men).
I can’t back you on the not speaking intelligible English thing, though. We speak perfectly intelligibly. Some people are stupid, and some perfectly smart people express themselves really poorly, but that has nothing to do with the state they live in or the accent they have.
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While there are more than plenty of racial stereotypes here, as well, in Maine if someone is being loud, driving badly, or wearing flamboyant clothing, the default assumption (in the summer, at least) is that they are French Canadian. This is reinforced by the selective mechanism you described: if the flashy dresser, say, does turn out to be a Quebecois, you remember. If not…well, those instances tend to fade away.
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I lived all over the country–or at least all over east of the Mississippi–and I found more people utterly incomprehensible in Oklahoma than anywhere else. It had nothing to do with smarts or class; my high school academic bowl team (from Tulsa) played teams from small, rural towns, and sometimes I literally could not understand what the other team said (once or twice, neither could the judges). They were often incredibly smart, but raised with heavy, heavy accents. It wasn’t class, either; plenty of rich oil families I could barely understand, too. Educated, certainly grammatically correct, big words, but thick “hick” accent.
It’s not a value judgement, honestly. Which is why “hick” is in quotation marks; I don’t think all people who talk like that are “hicks”. Whatever that means. But in the seven years I spent in Oklahoma, I met more people with accents so thick I couldn’t understand them than I did anywhere else. That’s all I was saying.
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Not that it really matters, but I want to point out that I think “bad driver,” in this conversation, means drivers who drive too fast or too slow, weave, aren’t paying attention, fail to stop at stop signs, can’t merge, etc. Maybe they get into fender-benders. I don’t think that the conversation ends and starts at drivers who cause or are involved in fatal accidents.
On the other hand, I also don’t think that we’re really talking about bad drivers at all.
(On yet another hand, playing with widgets is admittedly fun.)
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I hadn’t really thought about defining “bad driver.” If somebody were to ask me, “What is a bad driver?” I could probably give a reasonable list of unsafe or illegal driving maneuevers that would likely match up fairly well with whatever you’d find in your local driver’s manual. But if we’re talking about me by myself, on the road, driving along, a “bad driver” is whoever pisses me off for whatever given reason. Which has a lot more to do with my prejudiced beliefs about certain groups of people than it has to do with my real and true feelings about signalling before you change lanes.
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In Montreal, it’s traditionally English versus French, so stereotypes are a matter of perspective. Francophones think Anglos are oppressive assholes with no culture who hate them, think they’re uppity, and resent their political and social gains. Anglophones think the Francophones are rude, low-class morons who have gained too much power and are now oppressing them with their ‘reverse discrimination’. What it basically boils down to is:
French guy: Anglos are assholes who hate us and are trying to keep us down.
English guy: Francos are assholes who hate us and are trying to bring us down.
However, the large population of Allophones/immigrants (particularly non-white) are the ‘taking all the jobs’ and simultaneously ‘lazy welfare types living off the system’, particularly to a certain (fairly new) group of right-wing Francophone nationalists (who scare the fuck out of me). Anglophones are typically too high class to have such such unseemly opinions – unless they’re talking about the French, of course.
Typically, the French Quebecois have been the most progressive large group politically in the country, with the mainstream separatist parties (Bloc Quebecois at the federal level and Parti Quebecois at the provincial) being the most left-wing of the major parties. So then, that gets into the conservative West’s stereotypes of the French as artsy communist faggots. And, yeah, both English and French here think of Westerners – particularly Albertans – as backwards, right-wing Neanderthals.
And, as always, First Nations members are drunk and lazy, while simultaneously being uppity extremists demanding too much from the rest of Canada and haven’t ‘we’ ‘given’ them enough already?
As for who drives badly? I’ve only ever heard that women were bad drivers, and that was only ever from my father, who did acquiesce when I asked him ‘if women are such bad drivers, how come men’s insurance rates are higher?’
I’m in a bit of a strange (although, I assume, not terribly uncommon) position, being the daughter of a French Quebecoise and an Eastern European immigrant, both working class and ‘other’ in Southern Ontario where they settled. Now, being a white, educated Anglophone woman in Montreal puts me in the privileged Anglo ‘true Canadian’ category, but I speak French well enough to be mistaken for a Francophone, and of course I’m familiar with the immigrant experience, so I’m kind of privy to both the public and private prejudices and bigotry of many sides. Francophones share their Anglo hate with me as though I’m an insider, and Anglos share their hate of Francos not realising that that’s half of my heritage. Those who have both white and class privilege share their hipster racism and elitism with me, but back home I get all the bigotry of working class, uneducated, Allophone, white people. This is where I hear about scary black men, Muslim terrorists, and world controlling Jews.
As for my own personal prejudices that presumably arise from the blending of those backgrounds? The most privileged people are the scariest. Rich, straight, white boys scare the fuck out of me. They’re the only group that I will cross the street to avoid. To me, they’re the ones most likely to be rapist, harassing, and violent. AND they’re the ones taking all our good jobs.
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In Texas (where I’m from) it’s Teh Mexicans (pronounced meskins to be even more insulting) and when I lived in Alberta, personally, I never noticed another race because Alberta has got to be the whitest damn place on earth so my “bad drivers” were Canadians. And my bad drivers are Canadians because they didn’t do all the common things we do here like move to the shoulder to let a car pass or move to the far side of the road if a car is parked in the shoulder. Or wave at passing cars on the highway *L* I did hear about negative Asian stereotypes such as rudeness and standing too close in lines but from this Texan who is used to at least 4 feet behind and in front of my out of politeness, the white Canadians were rude too. A lot of things that were attributed to those rude Asians, I personally attributed to Canadians and it’s honestly just a cultural difference. Canadian version of polite isn’t even close to Southern polite and many were shocked when I would point this out. Taking your shoes off before entering a house is polite there, here people will wonder if you plan to raid their underwear drawer too since you’ve obviously just taken it upon yourself to make yourself at home. I was horrified, HORRIFIED when my husbands friends just took their shoes off. And I had to ask before I would take my shoes off, and even after asking I was profoundly uncomfortable doing so. So I was able to refute those “rude Asian” comments by pointing out how rude white Canadians would seem to Texans. I think it worked, some people at least stfu about it around me.
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Aurora Erratic, I’m from Ontario, and we have exactly the same assumptions about the Quebecois. I’m not there anymore, but spent two years in Ottawa and every time a driver cut me off, turned without signalling, etc., I’d scream “Fucking French!!” whether it was a Quebec license plate or not. I’m not particularly proud of this.
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An additional note: In Southern Ontario, where I grew up, the stereotype of Asians was that they were good at math and science and were all engineers, computer scientists or doctors. The fact that one of the local universities – the one with the big, fancy, world-famous math, computer science and engineering programmes – had a large (possibly even majority) Asian population certainly contributed to that perception. And while ‘Asian’ in this context really means East, South, and Central Asian, I think the average white person’s perception was that of Asian = Chinese/Japanese/Korean.
This makes me think of my father: Had I brought home a black boyfriend (from anywhere), a Muslim (Arab or otherwise), or even a South Asian (who are clearly, in that city at least, a major part of the ‘smart, math-lovin’, professional Asian’ group, despite the main perception), he would have had a coronary. But if I’d brought home a Chinese guy, that would have been aces, even though, because it’s me, the guy would have been a bi commie poet or something of the sort. While this is anecdotal, it’s pretty much standard for working class white people in that area; I’ve heard plenty of people express the same basic ideas about ‘Asians’ (i.e. East Asians) being superior to white people, who are in their turn superior to black people, vaguely defined brown people, and people of First Nations.
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Strangely I ended up having this conversation with my mother and a family friend this weekend because they were making comments about bad driving based on racial stereotypes. I was very glad I had read this saturday morning because I had been thinking about my own stereotypes all day and I like to think I helped them realize a little bit that they were basing their beliefs on stereotypes. I still have a ways to go personally on the -ism continuum, but this blog and quite a few others are helping me exponentially. Thanks.
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i was going to say the same thing about NYC – it’s not the ethnicity of the driver, but the fact that they’re driving a taxi or a car that points out they are “bridge and tunnel trash” (natives rarely drive, and when they do it’s to leave the city; i didn’t learn to drive until i went to college in pa)
at my school (private, xian), every minority was equally hated/shunned, but in my neighborhood(s), if you had enough money to afford rent and decent clothes you were pretty well accepted
NYC has always seemed to me more classist than racist, probably because by the time i was born (1966) the city was so diverse
otoh, my dad and his father and grandparents (from central pa and south jersey) were quite racist when i was growning up, and my dad still makes me cringe sometimes – but i gave up on those conversations with him when i was a teenager; he can easily accept that person x who’s chinese doesn’t fit his stereotype, but he can’t get that stereotyping is wrong
these days, i live in LA, where pretty much everyone who’s not us sucks at driving, and the more expensive the car the more likely they are to be either:
a) oblivious
b) on the phone/texting
c) have no idea how large (small) said vehicle is
d) weaving all over the highway
e) drunk/on drugs
f) all of the above
oh, and the first time i heard the asians can’t drive stereotype was from a burmese friend who was referring to himself (he can’t drive, it’s terrifying to be a passenger in his car unless i’m totally fubar)
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Yanno, I grew up in the South in a highly segregated city, but the bad drivers/loud talkers/tacky clothes-wearing/heavy drinkers were always “white trash,” not women or “the coloreds.”
One interesting theory about this particular sort of racism/dislike of the minority cultures is called “the theft of pleasure” by a cultural critic I like very much named Slavoj Zizek. Zizek claims that racism is a sort of inner jealousy that cannot be admitted within the confines of the dominant culture. “Those people have spicy food/loud music/drive too fast!” can also be read as “Those people are having more fun than I am, dammit!”
Reading everyone’s comments here through that lens is very interesting.
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I live in a small town, about 15,000 people and I work at the local university. We have a lot of international students, mostly Indian, Korean, and Nigerian. Several of my white coworkers have complained that the international students don’t know how to drive. Yet every time I see someone running a light or driving down the center of a road it is a white person. Seriously I’ll see 3 cars and a semi truck run a light and it is all white people yet when I complain to my coworkers about the crazy drivers in this town they blame the international students. I’m a black American so maybe I’m biased towards Nigerian drivers and I assume they are American but surely I would have noticed Asian drivers? The truth is that there are so few brown people in this town that they stick out in my mind so I would have noticed if they were driving crazy.
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That sounds very interesting!
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Speaking of being oblivious to racist stereotypes, when I was a kid, I was pretty sheltered from stereotypes of any kind. It probably helped, so to speak, that I lived in an almost exclusively white community; there were fewer opportunities for white people to comment on stereotypes in my hearing. When I was about 5 or 6, just old enough to read on my own, I stumbled on a Sambo book, and I just didn’t get it. I’m sure it was rife with stereotypes, but, since I’d never been exposed to them, the entire story didn’t make a lick of sense to me. As one example, at the end of the book, Sambo ate some flapjacks (which, I presume, is a racist stereotype), but my only reaction was: they eat pancakes in Africa?
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I spent most of my life growing up in what we called the “Bible Belt” of Southern Alberta. The only people of colour I ever saw on a regular basis were First Nations and people of Japanese descent who’s families had been forced into internment camps during WWII. Unfortunately, one of these camps had been located not too far from the city in which I lived. Great history, eh?
There wasn’t too much said about the Japanese-Canadians, though my white privilege may have prevented me from hearing it.
The groups everyone talked trash about were the First Nations people. How they are always late, they are lazy, they are all drunk, they are all criminals, they are all taking money from the government and wasting it on drugs… No one called them bad drivers because everyone assumed none of them actually drove. No one said they were “taking our jobs” because everyone assumed they didn’t work. These assumptions, and others much worse, were perfectly acceptable to spout in polite society. It was viewed as fact: Native Americans are all drunk, lazy idiots raising drunk, lazy children. My parents are included in this society.
Now that I have moved to the East Coast, I haven’t heard nearly as much racisim in regards to aboriginals. But I do hear it all the time about other groups so it really is no better.
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Like SteveJ I’m in the UK, but a different area – I live in East Anglia, and we tend to see less of a prejudice against non-white minorities, but a huge amount of prejudice against Eastern Europeans (Polish, Latvian etc.).
There was a surge in Eastern European economic migration to the UK a few years ago and a lot of the migrants took on seasonal and low paid labour – fruit picking, cleaning, delivery driving etc. This led to the usual ‘taking our jobs’ outrage. The thing is, those jobs were there before the migrants came along, they’re just more prepared to work in manual, low paid jobs than a lot of English people seem to be.
As for driving, in Bedford at least there is an assumption that any car with a large number of dents in the bodywork and a driver who doesn’t know how to signal, read road signs or use a roundabout is going to be Eastern European. Likewise, anyone walking around in skin tight neon clothing and/or bright red fake snakeskin boots with music playing on their mobile phone…
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I’m in London, so like Isabel, no-one drives, hence I don’t know of any stereotypes.
The only time I’ve heard bad driver stereotypes was in Dubai (lived there as an expat brat for 2 years) – there was some truth to it, though, in that there was some genuinely scary terrible driving. Of course, all the bad drivers were Asian, though, in this discourse – never white expats. Although many expats, especially those who learn out there (and you do, as there is no public transport) also drive frighteningly (I once refused to get in the car of a friend’s older sister, who had just got her licence and by UK standards *could not drive*). The driving test there is ‘drive down the road 6 metres, indicate, turn’.
I haven’t heard any other stereotypes – I tend to hang out with relatively PC type people. And I live in Streatham (near Brixton) so haven’t heard local working-class white people say anything, but that’s probably because they’d get beaten up saying anything racist in public. There is certainly a media stereotype that black young men/ teenage boys do badly at school, leave as soon as they can, are then unemployed and are involved in gang violence and generally in crime. (The black women as strong and capable stereotype is I think universal?).
There is probably a ‘loud’ stereotype about black Afro-Carribean people though. The charming practice of playing music out loud on buses is often done by young black guys (*shrug* much as my good PC side wants to sympathise, I do think that is antisocial) – does this happen in the US?
Agree with whoever said it above that the ‘taking our jobs!’ prejudice is against Eastern Europeans. Black people are more likely to be seen as benefit scroungers.
Not saying any of these stereotypes are right. I don’t believe them. That said, sometimes I catch myself thinking things I shouldn’t, so I like the idea of saying these/ writing them down.
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Thanks for this post
You have one of my most favourite blogs, Fugitivus. I love reading your latest commentary on your life or the world, you have a lot of insight and you write very well – with a dash of humour. All the best in your new job! Glad you found one that you think you will enjoy.
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As an Asian who is probably not as proud of being an Asian as I should be, I have noticed a few stereotypes regarding other Asians and try to avoid them at all costs. I guess you would call it reverse-racism. These are the ones I have noticed:
1. Asians drive Hondas or Toyotas (I refused to be another Asian driving a Honda, so I bought an American-made one)
2. Asian women are slow drivers (I, on the other hand, got my driving skills and road rage from my father, who is not Asian, and I drive with a lead foot and curse like a truck driver)
3. Asian males like to drive cars with spoilers (more often than not, at least around here, you will find an Asian male behind the wheel of a souped up Honda or Toyota sedan with a spoiler and an unbearably loud engine)
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I’m from a tiny town in north Florida. There, women and Asians are the bad drivers and people of color are the loud/ignorant/criminal ones. Asians are seen as harmless and book-smart, but lacking in common sense and driving skills.
Also, by the way, all you (presumably white) folks out there who think there aren’t any negative stereotypes where you live, c’mon now. Seriously? Privilege makes us blind, but are there actually people who are THAT oblivious?
On a side note, I’ve heard of discrimination in maternity wards against women of color based on their supposed loudness/aggressiveness/high-strung-ness. Remember that part from Knocked Up in which whatshernameblondeactress was told to quiet down a little ’cause the nurse didn’t want her to “scare the other pregnant women” and she responded with a primal scream of indignation? It’s like that, but racially based, instead of you’re-just-a-high-strung-little-lady… based.
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With conversations about race, I like to sit back and listen as much as I can before coming in. And this post, even though I really don’t think it’s very interesting as a post, has generated some of the highest amount of comments in the shortest amount of time, which really makes me want to sit back and wait and listen more.
But yeah, that’s been on my mind. You can, with 100% authority, say you’ve never heard something that you construed as a racist stereotype. You cannot say with any authority that you live in a place without racist stereotypes, because there is not a single place on this earth where that is true. A place where people don’t talk about race, or feel that race doesn’t need to be brought up, or feel racism only exists elsewhere, is about as racist as racist gets.
We hear from white families who adopt children of color, and they would have sworn up and down, before the adoption, that their church/family/neighborhood is totally unracist. But once they bring that kid home, and actually get to see their church/family/neighborhood interact with somebody who isn’t white, they suddenly realize there wasn’t a lack of racism, just lack of a target. (They also suddenly realize that they were living in a completely white landscape, which somehow, by itself, wasn’t already racist.)
If you live in a place that doesn’t discuss race, you live in a racist place.
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Heh, I grew up in France, and I’ve always heard that women were bad drivers. Now I live in Taipei and i have strictly no idea who the locals think are bad drivers. Probably the taxi drivers.
Otherwise in France you can fill in any negative stereotype with Arab/Black. They’re taking jobs/lazy/thieves/etc etc. Or these are applied to the Roma.
On the other hand I realised that “Hispanic” isn’t really considered a race so much back home, probably cause I’m southern French, Spain is about a five-hour drive from where I lived and half the kids I grew up with had Spanish forebears.
Oh, and prostitutes are supposedly usually Romanian for some reason.
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Ever hear of the blog “stuff white people do”?
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Yeah, I just got guest-posted on it.
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Amanda, Harriet, if that was directed at me. (If it wasn’t, ignore this).
Speaking only for myself, I meant that *I* haven’t heard *bad driver* stereotypes *where I currently live*, not ‘I’ve never heard any racist stereotypes, ever!’ Which would be a stupid thing to say, clearly.
(even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to assume that meant they didn’t exist).
And sure, ‘PC’ ‘colour blindness’ and it not being polite to talk about race can absolutely be a way to just not address racism.
I certainly don’t live in a white landscape, though.
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I’ve lived in Hawaii my whole life, and the “bad drivers” here are the white folk. It’s always “Stupid fucking Haole drivers in their gas-guzzling asshole trucks” or “Haoles keep coming here and taking all the jobs” and “fucking Haoles appropriating our culture and raping our land and oogling our women.” Haole, by the way, comes from Hawaiian and means “without breath,” indicating that one does not speak the language and is therefore foreign (as in when Hawaii was still an independent sovereign nation) and therefore white.
Its disturbing how widely accepted it is here. What disturbs me even more, though, is how white people come to live here, experience racial discrimination for the first time in their lives and say “wow, this isn’t fair, people really suck here,” rather than “oh, this must be what people who are not white experience everywhere else in the country.”
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Ag, I feel bad about my comment about music being played out loud (i.e. on speakers, not headphones – just to be clear for non-UK and non-London people!) – I meant that this is *a perception* and just part of the loud stereotype… it certainly wasn’t meant as a criticism or ‘but look, black people really do this’ or that *only* black people do this or anything, it was just a comment on the general perception.
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Bad driving stereotypes here (large city, Australia);
1. I’ve definitely heard the Asian drivers one. Probably initially because of the large influx of Vietnamese/Chinese migrants in the late 80s/early 90s, now aimed almost exclusively at overseas students. Particularly aimed at overseas students in expensive looking vehicles driving on international licences.
2. P-platers. You have to display P-plates (for ‘probationary’) for the first three years of driving on the car. Given that a lot of people get their license at 18, there’s a lot of 18-21 year old P-platers. Breaks into subsets – a pickup (‘ute’) with Ps will be a young male hoon, a hatchback Hyundai will be a young female hoon, a Holden Commodore is a hoon no matter what gender. More so if it’s red. Also the Ford equivalent.
3. Somalis, Eithiopians, Eritreans etc. Guess where the newest large wave of immigration’s from.
4. Volvo drivers. This was more common when I was growing up, when Volvo brought out those boxy cars that were regarded as being very safe. Volvo drivers either drive very slowly or way too fast (safe cars, can’t damage themselves). Common enough that Volvo made an ad about it.
5. Taxi drivers. All of them. But especially the most recent immigrants.
6. Indian drivers. Technically this is a combination of the overseas student and the taxi driver groups, but it’s become a lot more noticeable in the last 5 or so years, as the number of overseas students and migrants from India has increased.
7. Country drivers. Cannot deal with trams, are always merging at the last minute and drive too slowly. Especially if they’re in country looking vehicles. I cop this one sometimes as I bought my car in my parent’s small town and it has a country dealership sticker on it.
8. Female drivers. More so if they’re P-platers, blonde or Asian for some odd reason.
9. Middle eastern drivers. I used to hear this one a lot in the suburb I previously lived in – for the simple reason that the largest ethnic group was Lebanese, and there were a lot of Arabic speakers in the area. Now I’m in a different area I don’t hear it at all, it’s been replaced by the other stereotypes. Even in the area where I was it’s being supplanted by the Indian driver one.
10. Any driver with a hat on the back parcel shelf is crap, particularly if they’re male. Sort of the ‘old drivers’ one but very specific.
The loud stereotype is directed at school kids (easily recognisable in their uniforms) and uni students (obviously not school kids because not in uniform but still loud.) It’s not an ethnic so much as a youth stereotype.
Who takes our jobs? Hm, difficult. New Zealanders and the English cop it a lot, but Indian, Chinese, South African and other migrants are starting to become more common in those stakes.
Who’s lazy and drunk? *sigh* Aborigines. Even in a state with the second lowest indigenous population that still holds on.
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…..what’s a hoon?
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I live in Sydney, in Australia, and I’ll second lsn’s comment about the appalling way Aboriginal people are portrayed/perceived here. They’re always the drunk, lazy, shiftless bums, living off welfare, and petty criminals (never mind that they’re gaoled for minor crimes that most white people would simply be cautioned for; don’t get me started on this lunacy). You’d think after the Redfern Park speech, the Mabo native title decision and 0
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Your homestate’s ethnic-stereotype geography sounds like my homestate’s ethnic-stereotype geography. (Which makes me think there’s some kind of depressing art project to be had in that idea… Like this, only sad: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/chicago/ork092308.jpg)
My hometown is the town of the whole scary Disappearing Somali Young Men Ending Up Dead In Somalia situation. I think people have had some cognitive dissonance going on, because on the one hand, they get to have the knee-jerk “see, SEE we told you, TOLD YOU, Muslims are all terrorists! See!” reaction.
Then we hear all these upset community workers and distraught parents on the radio talking about how upsetting and distressing it is that their sons are disappearing and turning up dead in Somalia (so… Muslims are terrorists, unless they are parents and community workers, and friends and guidance people at the local mosque… what’s going on here?!?!?!? AGH!??? ARE YOU TERRORISTS OR NOT!?!).
Then people have a really unlovely think about what it means when, in these specific cases, people “go back where they came from.” They’re enticed/coerced/who knows what, and then BAD THINGS HAPPEN. And in fact their families wanted with everything they had for their sons to stay…
Yeah. Dissonance.
On top of the usual “African immigrants drive badly and steal our jobs and do well in our college classes, how dare they.”
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My hometown is a university town in the midwest. The students are probably about 20% of the city population, and they are the ones vilified as bad drivers and loud. I would say that objectively the students are more likely to turn unexpectedly, drive slowly, and stop suddenly than people who have been driving there for years. I can’t blame them; the town is not even remotely rationally designed, and is filled with unexpected one-way streets that randomly end, curve around to go a different direction, and aren’t labeled well. I lived there for 19 years and I still can’t navigate some areas without a lot of backtracking. Add in a perpetual construction season, and it’s not a fun town for driving, but the bus system is slow, expensive, and cumbersome.
The loudness complaint is completely unfounded.
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It’s a yob, a loud and perceivably unpalatable yoof who, er, hoons around pulling doughnuts and wheel skids in their cars with loud bassy music thumping. That’s quite specific, the stereotype can be used more broadly than that.
A hoon: one who gads about with little regard for civil order.
To hoon: to gad about with little regard for civil order.
Can be associated with boy racers. Sometimes the definition overlaps with the attributes of a bogan (hence Isn’s Commodore reference).
Bogan: Black jeans wearing, heavy hair metal listening, hoony petrolheadish person, often seen in the back yard, smoking rollies, sipping on a bourbon and coke and letting their luxurious mullet stream down their neck in the summer sun.
Got off track again. Sorry.
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In my neighborhood it was Asians who can’t drive, Mexicans are “taking all the jobs” and Mexicans AND Blacks who “can’t take care of their kids” and “run down the neighborhoods” and just Blacks who “talk way too loud.”
I tried not to let any of these sink in. I’m not precisely sure how successful I was, but I’m still working on it.
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I think the ‘bad drivers’ stereotypes serve as a smoke screen to cover the fact that going by stats most serious road accidents can be attributed to young white male drivers.
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I live in the state with the dubious distinction of being “Second Whitest in the country” and many of the stereotypical behaviors attributed to people of color, in particular Black folks, I observe white folks doing. Many of these behaviors can be attributed to class (we’re also a real poor state), though I suspect most folks making these claims aren’t generally going sift through race class conflation and come out the other side.
Love your blog!
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I know, right? The loudest people I know are white guys whenever they complain about how loud black guys are.
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I’ll see you that, and raise you this:
I think white male drivers perceive themselves as having the right to drive poorly. It’s not “poor” driving when they do it, but aggressive, entitled driving — they get to drive as fast as they want, as recklessly as they want, in whatever goddamn lane they want, because it’s more important that their needs are exclusively met than it is that everybody gets a safe driving experience. Swerving, speeding, and failing to signal isn’t poor driving when white guys do it; instead, those are signs that other people have failed to give the white male driver proper space and deference. The white guy isn’t speeding; other people aren’t getting out of his way.
When somebody else engages in poor driving — somebody who isn’t white and male — they are usurping, by force, a social position that usually only white men inhabit. A non-white, non-male poor driver is forcing everybody else on the road to be attentive and submissive, putting the poor driver’s whims, desires, and destination above everybody else on the road. Suddenly, that becomes intolerable, because somebody who doesn’t “deserve” — and somebody we aren’t used to naturally getting — that momentary social status has acquired it through threat of violence (i.e. horrible car crashes).
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I love your blog! I admire your bravery in admitting your biases and privilege (even online, even semi-anonymously, this still takes guts). You spell things out so clearly.
I teach a course on Cultural Diversity at a well-known online university. My students say the most racist shit ALL THE TIME with absolutely no awareness. They are like innocent little lambs who think that just because they have one black friend, they could not possibly be racists. Oh no. And so I walk a constant tightrope exposing them to their biases while not accusing them of anything too heavy (“what, me a racist?”), lest they shut down and stop listening to me.
One thing I try to hammer home is that we ALL have biases. I have biases – I also believe that the loud person is going to be black. They have biases, which they expose in almost everything they say. A stereotype does not mean that you are a bad person, just that you sometimes think in bad ways (and therefore probably also act in bad ways). It is the process of recognizing and evaluating our stereotypes that makes us more conscious people.
I’m thinking of linking them to your post. It was a great example of how if we already have a stereotype (blacks are bad drivers), we automatically support our subconscious conclusion with new data, glossing over evidence that doesn’t support it.
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In case you’re looking for permission, I’m very open about anything being linked anywhere. Once it’s been posted, it’s public domain.
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I live in a city with enough transplants that the people whose driving gets complained about is, um, the natives. Like, if I lived in Boston, we’d all be saying “Man, Bostonians really don’t know how to drive!” every day. Wait, I did live in Boston, and we did say that a lot there, too.
To be fair, seriously, it rains all the damn time here and yet nobody knows how to drive in the rain. Fernando help us when we get that half-inch of snow every year and everyone proclaims it an unprecedented blizzard and throws on their tire chains.
We complain about Californians, too, but not specifically their driving. My sister thought that “Californian influx” was my euphemism for Mexicans, but no; my general impression is that we love us some Mexicans but are really sick of Californians moving north and complaining about the colder weather.
I hadn’t ever heard the stereotype about Asians driving until some douche I worked with and had to ride with for a job cracked up with “Man, no wonder that lady can’t drive, she’s Asian *and* a woman! Heh heh, heh,” as though I was supposed to find the line hilarious; he was very upset and confused when I didn’t laugh.
[Side note: I think that Bostonians really do know very well how to drive, so well in fact that they are perfectly willing to smite you with with their driving ability.]
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Ha. My people are certainly exuberant, though they don’t hold the patent on this quality. It was Tom Cruise jumping and hollering on that couch, not Oprah. Though actually that would have been really funny.
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I live in a superliberal, predominantly-white (with lots of Latino and SE Asian) mid-sized town in Northern California (pop. 50K). I had to think a minute, because: superliberal. People don’t tend to just let loose with that kind of stuff. Not when I’m around, anyway. (I’m brown.) But then it hit me: hippies!
Around here, hippies are the casually stereotyped group of choice (they’re always white). There are two, main subsets of “fuckin’ hippy”: there’s “Dirty Fuckin’ Hippy” who sports blonde dreads and filthy tie-dye, and spends the money she gets from aggressive panhandling on vegan food and weed. S/he’s semi-homeless (ie: living in an old schoolbus) but for some reason has a pet dog, the dumbass. DFHs smell, they loiter, they form drum circles; in short, they run down the neighborhood and drive away your customers. Also, some DFHs are just playing at poverty; they’re “trust-fund DFHs.” Then there’s “Fuckin’ Rich Hippy,” who made a shitload of money, no doubt unethically, some time in the 80s/90s and moved to this li’l town cuz it was so “quaint.” FRHs are why they’re building yet another Whole Foods and why all the restaurants are fuckin’ sushi places now and WTF, you can’t find any goddamn meat in this town anymore. All Priuses on the road are driven by older FRHs (badly; he’s on the phone, natch). Younger FRHs prefer to ride bikes everywhere because a) it’s better for the environment, you damn Earth-killer; and b) it’s fun to weave recklessly through traffic/fail to stay in the bike lane/come out of nowhere and almost giving you a damn heart attack.
The DFH can’t or won’t get his shit together, which is contemptible and infuriating (some of us have to work for a living!). DFH is also blamed all kinds of social problems. That’s usually the brown/immigrant person stereotypical space. The FRH is clearly clueless (can’t even drive that fancy car!) but has nevertheless somehow come out on top in life, which is frustrating and seemingly random; he is also out of touch (eco-warrior). That’s the “ivory-tower upper class” stereotypical space.
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Oh, and, while I wait for my turkey to cook…
just wanted to note that the original Bad Driver was/is, without question, the woman driver. Every other version of it (Asians, old people) is merely a modern remix. In fact, the women-are-bad-drivers stereotype was in place when people were still driving Model A’s (never mind that back then, everybody was just learning to drive), and it didn’t crop up by accident: back then (even more than now) the vast majority of automotive mishaps were caused by men. What’s so interesting is that prior to the automobile, there was no such stereotype at all. Women were not said to be unable to handle wagons and horses and so on.
This is all well documented; here’s a li’l something on the subject; it’s interesting to apply this to the modern remixes (emphasis mine):
“Although often presented in a humorous context, folklore concerning the behavior of women automobile drivers, and the development of a stereotype concerning them, emerged for very serious social reasons. … In the male-dominated America of the early 20th Century, women at the wheel posed a serious threat to long-established ideas and practices. The automobile threatened to restructure the social status of women and the meaning of family life in America. As a result, defenders of the status quo sought a means by which female use of the motor car might be limited. Hence, the emergence of folklore concerning the alleged disabilities of feminine motorists, and the eventual development of the full-blown, negative ‘woman driver’ stereotype.”
Berger, M.L.; ‘Women Drivers!: The Emergence of Folklore and Stereotypic Opinions Concerning Feminine Automotive Behavior’
(1986) Women’s Studies International Forum, 9 (3), pp. 257-263.
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I’ve actually heard the bad-drivers stereotype from a Korean lady herself (my family has a lot of Korean friends, as that is one of the largest Asian groups locally, and my mother teaches ESL) — directed towards chinese/japanese drivers. Which is interesting because it’s like a sub-category of the “asians are bad drivers” thing; it’s basically “asians are bad drivers… except us koreans, of course!”
And my mother always “jokes” about bad drivers being Quebecois. And I bet if we still lived in England, it’d be the French who’re the bad drivers according to her. She thinks it’s harhar funny to make fun of french-speaking people because we Brits are “supposed” to hate them.
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Wow. That is the nail on the head, right there.
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re: aggressive, entitled driving
If you sub out “white males” and replace it with “drives expensive car” you have captured the social dynamic of driving on the Westside of Los Angeles. Very often, the car that assumes your right-of-way is nicer than yours – often much nicer.
If you drive a beater, expect to be cut off and sworn at. People yell at you for parking too close to their vehicles, or their houses. If you drive a beater truck, like I did for many years, you’re definitely assumed to be Mexican. (FTR: I’m an arty white nerd lady.) Once on Skid Row I was offered a gig as a whore based solely upon the sad state of my vehicle at the time.
Not to say this eliminates or even trumps the usual race-based crapola – all alive and well around here. Probably makes it worse, even. But that’s the best description of my commute home I’ve ever heard. Thanks!
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It’s interesting that I immediately recognized all these stereotypes- I am guessing we grew up in the same province.
Having lived in Canada and the States and in numerous cities within both countries I have a huge bag of stereotypes for every place. But the ones I most easily catch are ones from my childhood- those are the ones that had the lasting power.
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That huge bag of stereotypes aren’t ones that I believe just the local generalities. I made it sound like I was proud to have so many personal stereotypes.
I catch some in myself and like you fight to combat and not perpetuate them.
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thank you thank you thank you for this blog.
Where I grew up, women couldn’t drive, actually. :O
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hmmm – I guess I didn’t read a lot of the other comments before I posted that first comment of mine about women being bad drivers.
Sorry. But. Yeah. :blush:
I mean, I suppose it would count towards statistics.
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I found this post very interesting, since my ex-boyfriend’s racism (and anger in general) mainly came out when he was driving. He also made lots of angry comments about other drivers when I was driving. I was trying to make it work, so I tried to explain to him why I found this problematic. Aside from the racist part, I had to assume that he was scrutinizing my driving as well, and finding the same transgressions he was criticizing “those people” for. So when he was yelling at them he might as well have been yelling at me. He didn’t deny it, just seemed a little surprised that I had caught on.
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In my Montreal neighbourhood, the bad drivers are the Hassidic Jews. They are also rude, backwards and abuse their children. Visible, unapologetic difference and demands for accommodation (tinting the windows at the YMCA so that the yeshiva wouldn’t have a view of yoga class, e.g.) are symptoms of their arrogance and disdain for Quebec culture.
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This is not so much racist as it is sexist and I don’t think it’s common to my area so much as me. I generally think of bad drivers as being young men (18 – 25 sort of range). I’ve known plenty of bad female drivers, but like you I have that automatic urge to assign something to any jerk driving poorly and for me it’s “young male”.
I also had the experience of growing up in a very racially mixed area and moving to a much whiter area for college. It frequently bothers me that there are so few minorities on the side of town I live on. I know it’s not likely to change, but I wish folks didn’t self segregate racially. It’s a lovely town, but that’s the one thing that makes me feel like it wouldn’t be the best place for kids.
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Where I live it’s people from Turkey. I live in Germany. “They’re the loud ones”. I havent heard anything about them not being able to drive. But other thing’s I’ve heard were “they’re not able to adapt to German society” or “they always hit on women in nasty ways”.
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