Sam de Brito on Stereotypes

Y'all know how much I love Sam de Brito. Read on for a grand old discussion re stereotypes. (I've edited it a little for your benefit).

I just can't seem to get a good coffee from an Asian barista.

If I see an Asian person manning the espresso machine at a cafè, I immediately lower my expectations and brace myself for boiled, coffee-flavoured milk. That's a prejudiced statement but my narrow-mindedness works in reverse as well: I'll avoid a sushi restaurant where the cook has a Southern Cross tattoo and looks like he should be drinking green cans on Mount Panorama.

If I was shopping for a neurosurgeon, I'd again return to stereotype and push for an Asian because I want the person tinkering with my frontal lobe to have spent too much time studying, not chuckling about date rapes on Facebook at Sydney Uni ...My bigotry doesn't end there.

I like my hairdressers to be homosexual because a bogan named Shane wearing a Rabbitohs jumper is not gonna know what fringe suits me. I like models to be beautiful; I prefer bikies to be fat and wear beards, not tennis shoes and friggin' Ed Hardy T-shirts. Accountants cannot be cooler than me. IT dudes must have manboobs and ponytails.

This is how I order my world: my fearful pigeon-hole where I coo what I know and, rather than admit what I don't, I reach for stereotypes about everyone different from me, and I'm not alone in doing it.



In the last century, thanks to radio, cinema and TV, the average Aussie has gone from forming opinions based on personal experience, to the "Age of Spectatorship" - in which they're fed someone else's impressions of places and people they've never seen or met.

"The real environment is too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety and variety, so many permutations and combinations," wrote Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Lippmann in his book Public Opinion.

So we stereotype.

Click pic for bigger image.

Lippmann (another brainy Jew) coined the term back in 1922 declaring it a "repertory of fixed impressions ... we carry in our heads. For the most part we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see."

Note the illustrations on tarot cards and you'll find stereotypes have long been based on a broad or perceived truth.

This is the tricky part about them because, without continued social recognition, stereotypes don't make sense.

Cracking a joke about Maori scaffolders wouldn't hold water if there wasn't so many of them. However, it's the same murky waters you wade into suggesting black people are athletically superior to white, the Irish or Aboriginals are prone to alcoholism, women can't drive or poor people consider domestic violence foreplay.

It's an assumption based on a person's ethnicity, class or gender and, even though you may not be doing it out of hatred, it's still a product of ignorance.

Statistical probability demands there are Asian baristas who can make a short black so good it'd shut even Silvio Berlusconi's big mouth. It's just I haven't met one and confuse my limited experience with a universal truth. It's comforting. It gives me a sense of control because I can "predict" what's coming in my world. It may even make me feel better because, of course, only people with a vowel on the end of their name like me can make great coffee.

However, if you're on the receiving end of stereotyping, it gets old quickly.

Hardheads assume that, just because you're Indian you work in a call centre and meditate four hours a day; if you're a South African Jew you must be an arrogant tight-arse who beats black people with rolled-up newspapers. Scout master? A kiddie-fiddler. In a wheelchair? Must be helpless. Scandinavian woman? A nymphomaniac who eats muesli, naked in saunas.

It's what happens when we confuse race or class or gender with culture and social conditioning.

Instead of seeing individuals, we see stereotypes and it's why some of us are still amused by female council workers or a black President of America.

As Lippmann wrote: "The stereotype's hallmark is that it precedes the use of reason. It imposes a certain character on the data of our senses, before the data reach the intelligence. There is nothing so obdurate to education or criticism as the stereotype. It stamps itself upon evidence in the very act of securing the evidence."

And it's why, when I see an Asian barista, I force myself to order a latte in the gentle hope they'll prove me wrong and, by default, how complex, unpredictable and surprising the world actually is.