Tuesday 6 December 2016

Ethnicity (race)

UK Stereotypes:

White British- Traditional, christians etc.
Irish traveller/gypsies- "pikeys," steal from you, caravans, palm readers etc.
Asian (pakistani, indian etc.)- Ones from certain areas are portrayed as terrorists, also curry is a stereotype.
Black-  Fast runners, robbers, gangs, crime.
Asian (chinese, japanese etc.)- martial arts, chinese food, yin yang, dragons, maths etc.

US Stereotypes:

White American- Hillbillies, banjos, make america great again, patriotic, stupid.
African Americans- Gangs, police, guns, criminals, look down at.
Hispanic and latino- Mexican, need to go back home (Donald Trump), land takers, criminals, cleaners, etc.

As Pieterse forcefully put it in 1992; “The legacy of several hundred years of western expansion and hegemony, manifested in racism and exoticism, continues to be recycled in western culture in the stereotypical images of non-western cultures.”

Theorist Sarita Malik points out the obvious in her essay ‘The Construction of Black and Asian Ethnicities in British media (1998); “The word ‘race’ in the cultural and political terrain has almost universally been aligned with Black and Asian people, as though they are the only racial groups that ‘own’ an ethnicity… Whiteness has been naturalized, as though it is an invisible ‘norm.’ When it is of course an ethnic group like any other.