Tag Archives: stereotyping

Tamika Cross: Black Lives Matter Is About More than Police Violence

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Debbie says:

Since I read Dr. Tamika Cross’s story over the weekend, I’ve been unable to get it out of my head. Dr. Cross, a physician, was a passenger on a Delta flight from Detroit to Minneapolis when another passenger had a medical emergency and the flight crew called for a doctor.

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Dr. Cross responded and the flight attendant took one look at her, disbelieved her, and dismissed her help.

… they paged “any physician on board please press your button”. I stare at her as I go to press my button. She said “oh wow you’re an actual physician?” I reply yes. She said “let me see your credentials. What type of Doctor are you? Where do you work? Why were you in Detroit?” (Please remember this man is still in need of help and she is blocking my row from even standing up while Bombarding me with questions).

I respond “OBGYN, work in Houston, in Detroit for a wedding, but believe it or not they DO HAVE doctors in Detroit. Now excuse me so I can help the man in need”. Another “seasoned” white male approaches the row and says he is a physician as well. She says to me “thanks for your help but he can help us, and he has his credentials”. (Mind you he hasn’t shown anything to her. Just showed up and fit the “description of a doctor”) I stay seated. Mind blown. Blood boiling. (Man is responding the his questions and is seemingly better now Thank God)

The passenger lived. Delta has, more or less, apologized. Dr. Cross says she doesn’t want the flight attendant fired (perhaps because she is a better person than I am) though she does recommend “sensitivity training.” As I would expect, throughout the country and further, Black professionals are responding with their own stories of how they have been disbelieved, dismissed, and distrusted while trying to do their jobs. (I just finished reading Bryan Stevenson’s brilliant Just Mercy, in which Mr. Stevenson, an African-American lawyer, recounts being mistaken for the defendant in a trial. I’m sure it’s not his only story like that.)

Here’s my takeaway: being unable to believe that a Black woman is a physician is an exact parallel to being unable to believe that a Black suspect is unarmed. Okay, Dr. Cross was never in physical danger (though the sick passenger was). Both situations, and the myriad of comparable ones, demonstrate that white people have permission to decide we know what we need to know about the Black person standing in front of us, and that our permission to know that overrides and erases what they say about themselves. Notice that not only did the flight attendant block Dr. Cross, but no one on the flight seems to have stood up and said “Hey, she’s a doctor! Let her through!” It’s easy to blame the flight attendant, but dozens of other people are complicit here. And in all of these situations, we put ourselves at risk by thinking we know what’s going on.

Laurie and I spend a lot of time talking about body image as something that can, and often should, come from the inside out. We talk about learning to like what you see when you look in the mirror, learning to look at people like yourself, appreciate how they look to you in terms of both beauty and power, and then re-internalizing those visuals.

But we are also deeply aware that some aspects of body image come from the outside in. No amount of self-respect will get you through the flight attendant standing in your way in the aisle when all you want is to get to the unconscious man she doesn’t believe you can help. And no amount of self-respect will keep the killer cop’s bullet from destroying your internal organs.

When I read about Tamika Cross I thought immediately about Doc McStuffins.  Doc is a young girl who likes to doctor her stuffed animals; her mother is a doctor.

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I wouldn’t know about her if I didn’t have children of color as close friends. I bet many of my white friends have never heard of her. Doc isn’t the solution (there is no single solution), but at least she isn’t exacerbating the problem.

When we hear “Black Lives Matter,” we think about Black people killed by cops … and we should. I think it’s also important to think about Dr. Cross, and Bryan Stevenson, and the tens of thousands of other Black people and other people of color whose lives are being impeded, stalled, and disrespected because of our stereotypes, expectations, and assumptions.

Nothing About Us Without Us

Laurie and Debbie say:

“Nothing about us without us” is translated from the Latin (“Nihil de nobis, sine nobis”) and came into contemporary use in Central European, particularly Hungarian, law. The point is that no legal or social decision should be made about a group without the participation of members of that group. Most commonly in this century (in the U.S.), it’s used by disability activists.

Generally, the slogan refers to government and policy decisions. This week, however, we’ve run across two cases where the mainstream media has (for reasons we’ll go into a little later) deliberately distorted or ignored the true stories.

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale, has written a memoir called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother about her initial decision to raise her American children in a very strict, conventional Chinese fashion, which she’s the first to point out, although she calls it “Chinese parenting” for convenience, is not the parenting style of all Chinese parents and is the parenting syle of many non-Chinese parents. The Wall Street Journal put together a set of excerpts from the book, eye-catchingly entitled “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” and ran that article under Chua’s byline. She never saw it before it was published.

The article caused a firestorm of comment particularly in the Asian-Amerian community. Many Chinese people were understandably upset and angered by the prescriptive tone of the article.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘This is my particular hardcore way of parenting, take it or leave it, do whatever you want,'” says Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, a mother of four who writes the syndicated column, Adventures in Multicultural Living. “But the article is saying, ‘This is how Chinese people do it’ — implying that we all treat our kids this way. You spend so much time trying to break down racial stereotypes and after something like this, it all goes out the window.”

The problem is that what Wang is asking for is exactly what Chua says in her book. She told Jeff Yang of sfgate.com:

The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. But the worst thing was, they didn’t even hint that the book is about a journey, and that the person at beginning of the book is different from the person at the end — that I get my comeuppance and retreat from this very strict Chinese parenting model.

I’m not going to retract my statements about Chinese parenting. But I’d also note that I’m aware now of the limitations of that model — that it doesn’t incorporate enough choice, that it doesn’t account for kids’ individual personalities. And yet, I would never go all the way to the Western ideal of unlimited choice. Give 10-year-olds total freedom, and they’ll be playing computer games eight hours a day. I now believe there’s a hybrid way of parenting that combines the two paradigms, but it took me making a lot of mistakes along the way to get there.

You might, possibly, say that this was just an oversight or a confusion on the part of some Wall Street Journal staffer, who only glanced at the book and pulled a few key quotations, but it’s hard to believe when you know that the book’s cover says:

“This was supposed to be a story about how Chinese mothers are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old.” As Yang points out, there’s no trace of that humility in the Journal article. As a result of the Journal’s misrepresentation, and its fast migration through the Internet, Chua has gotten death threats, and she’ll probably spend the next five years trying to dispel people’s preconceptions of who she is and what she’s said.

Let’s jump from here to Leslie Feinberg’s problem. Many of our readers may know Feinberg as the author of the incomparable Stone Butch Blues , a brilliant autobiographical novel about a stone butch’s journey in the 1950s and 1960s.

Feinberg is justifiably incensed because Catherine Ryan Hyde, an estranged relative, has written a YA book with a transgender theme (a teenage girl who falls in love with a young man and then discovers he is an FTM transsexual in transition), and is now on book tour, where she is claiming that her understanding of Feinberg’s life is one of the underpinnings of her insight into the story.

Feinberg, who has for several years been too ill to speak or write easily, has emerged from seclusion to make a long clear statement:

On her author promotional tour, Catherine Ryan Hyde is developing an embryonic biography of my life—fictionalized and unauthorized—to which I give no consent. Her assertions are all easily found on the web in a google search.

“This is totally my story to tell,” Catherine Ryan Hyde publicly maintains. She claims insider knowledge, because, she says, she grew up with a “transgender sibling.”

She also claims that because I have written and spoken publicly about my own oppressions and life’s struggles, my life is now public domain for her imagination. This argument draws an equal sign between the right of oppressed individuals to self-expression, and the bigoted “voice-over” that contradicts and denies those oppressed identities and life experiences.

Hyde’s book tour is underwritten by her publishers, Alfred A. Knopf, a prestigious division of Random House, which is in turn a division of German media giant Bertelsmann.

So here we have two very different forms of mainstream media providing support for narratives which not only disagree with but undercut and undermine the authentic voices of the people being discussed. This is nothing new: where stories of marginalized individuals and groups are concerned, the job of the mainstream media is to retell the story in a way that confirms the existing stereotypes of their audience … which (of course) also serves to keep the mainstream audience comfortable with only the oversimplified and untrue story. The vicious cycle is perpetuated, because then the true story sounds either false or too complicated to someone who has heard the simplistic one dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Which is why “nothing about us without us” is so important for media as well as for government. If we cannot hear the authentic voices (including the different experiences, disagreements, and ambiguities) from any group, we have no chance of understanding anything about that group. Both of these cases are especially insidious because the voices are disguised as genuine: Chua’s byline is on the Journal article, Hyde can claim close-kin personal experience. But in both cases, the real voice is erased by the false one.

Read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Read Stone Butch Blues.

Thanks to Nalo Hopkinson (on Facebook) for pointing out the Feinberg story.