ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606070006
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: William Raspberry
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
ROBERT Mallett, former city administrator for the District of Columbia, was a boy of 11 or 12 when he went to a restaurant with his parents. He went to use the restroom, and, as he was leaving, passed a white man and his son entering the facility.
The man spotted an unflushed urinal (Mallett had flushed his) and proceeded to lecture his son on the nasty habits of ``niggers.''
``Tears welled up in my eyes,'' Mallett, now a D.C. lawyer, recalled. ``My parents sensed that something was wrong when I returned to the table, but I insisted everything was all right. But after that, every time I left a restroom, if I was alone, I flushed all the toilets. I was determined that no one would ever come behind me and find an unflushed toilet.''
Indeed, he says, he stopped the practice only a half-dozen years ago, at age 33, when a friend caught him at it and wondered what on earth he was doing.
Mallett's sad-funny account is not exactly a ``lynching story.'' (Michel McQueen told her ABC colleague Ted Koppel that all black people have ``lynching stories'' - accounts of traumatizing racial encounters.) But in some ways such ``nothing'' little incidents are more insidious than the hard-edge racial confrontations, because they subtly shift the burden of the stereotype from perpetrator to victim.
Mallett told his story recently at a roundtable session sponsored by the National Conference (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews) to help media representatives and other opinion leaders understand the power of racial and ethnic stereotypes to poison race relations.
Chuck Stone, veteran journalist and now a distinguished professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, said journalists are ``an unwitting but powerful force in reinforcing and maintaining negative stereotypes.''
Some of the most damaging stereotypes, Stone said in a 45-minute lecture that highlighted the session, are those that carry no calculated insult.
He cited several examples from a list the National Conference has compiled for the update of its book, ``Building Bridges'': reporters who say ``welfare moms'' when they mean poor black women; who write ``taxpayers'' but have in mind white men; who describe neighborhood change as ``regentrification'' when the salient idea is whitening.
``Stereotypes are like a supermarket,'' he said. ``They are convenient, economical and useful. They do our thinking for us. We don't have to waste time trying to make sense of our ignorance. Stereotypes slice through the niceties of language, tide us over the loose ends we don't understand and wrap up, into a comfortable package, our narrow-mindedness about everything and everybody except ourselves.''
Still, it's Mallett's sad little tale that sticks in my mind. The ``lynching stories,'' like the gratuitous racial or ethnic slur, may leave you furious. (I'm thinking, for instance, of the black teen-ager forced to remove his new shirt and go home for the receipt because an employee at Eddie Bauer decided it must have been stolen, or the woman forced to undergo a strip-search at Victoria's Secret because she was suspected to be a thief.)
But the ``nothing'' stories are in some ways more powerful because they don't anger - merely make you deal with the stereotype directed against you. There's hardly a professional black man who hasn't, when encountering whites - especially white women - on isolated sidewalks, found himself forcing a smile to signal his harmlessness. Minority college students often find themselves behaving in ways calculated to avoid bringing discredit to their group. I've even known black people who pretended not to like watermelon because the stereotype says they love it.
And these are the sensitive, successful, determined-to-fit-in ones. How much deadlier the negative stereotypes can be for those who either lash out in violent anger against the perpetrator of the stereotypes or, perhaps worse, internalize the insult. I mean, for instance, young blacks who accept the notion that restrained behavior, careful speech and academic exertion are ``white.''
Stereotypes - including those perpetrated by the media - can be surprisingly powerful, whether they trigger racial hatred and violence or, as with Mallett, merely make us flush with embarrassment.
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 81 linesby CNB