The social construction and prevalence of racial stereotypes and direct racism addressed in both Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled (2000) and W.J.T Mitchell’s chapter from What do Pictures Want?, entitled Living Color, struck me as a topic well deserved of attention, but also quite obviously on the minds of many people today. While Spike Lee attempted to suggest that people are complacently accepting the idea that racism is not as rampant today, I believe the public and media’s constant preoccupation on what non-white communities signify, and the constant media redefinition of who and what an Arab, African American, Asian or any other minority is, reveals the important place stereotypes and racial discrimination play in the average non-minority North American person’s attempt to define who they are, and who “the other” is. Contrary to the belief that people are not longer engaged in countering racism and stereotyping, it appears from my purview of current media events, that such engagement is still present, just reoriented and diversified to include racism of many different types.
While Spike Lee’s film was meant to create awareness of how much our current popular culture is still involved in the production and maintenance of stereotypes that serve to define otherness and inferiority, I would like to suggest that the fact that current media can be found to be active in both the perpetuation of racial/religious myths, as well as the demystification of them, represents a current preoccupation with such notions, not a straight forward ignorance of their implications. With every instance of public and media related discussions of why or why not a myth (stereotype) is relevant, the ramifications of how stereotypes work and who they effect are being considered. Even if the efficacy of stereotypes is not the recognized topic it appears to be simmering on the back burners of the public’s mind. When Mitchell summarized the obsession over displaying the other as racially and culturally different, I think he made quite an interesting point. He stated:
While Spike Lee’s voice expresses outrage at the hatred he sees expressed in these images, his camera lingers with fascination, even with a kind of love, on their artistry. “Can you believe how much they hated us?” he asks. But he might equally well have asked, “Can you believe how much they cared about us, to turn us into comic characters in a racial melodrama, to put on blackface and mimic the caricatures of a people they supposedly despised?” (Mitchell 2005: 303)
The “cared” in this instance is not a concern for the “other”, but a constant preoccupation, both conscious and unconscious, to what “the other” means in relation to how “we” define ourselves. So, as stated above and evidenced by public’s constant need to define the most significant “other” of our time (our preoccupation with what an Arab, and more importantly an Arab-Muslim means) our preoccupation with this line of thinking is in part due to our lack of understanding of how similar and dissimilar to our own self-perception the group of people labeled as “other” have become. The questions of why and to what ends we use racial and religious stereotyping is consistently imbedded into the debate over who “the other” is, each and every time we question why stereotypes are used, and if they are at all accurate to the people we ascribed them to.
Possibly in understanding the socially constructed and misrepresentative nature of stereotypes, as well as their inability to effectively accomplish anything other than cultural oppression and political conflict, these debates may be able to provide a platform for eliminating stereotyping, instead of promoting it. Concern for the implications of racial discrimination is not dead, rather, it is alive and well, as evidenced all around us: in the media, in public discourses, and even in our class discussions for ANT323 over the history and misguided nature of Orientalist and Black American stereotypes.
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