In Stereo

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Why do we expect disabled people to be nice?

Why do we expect fat people to be stupid, young people to be rebellious, and old people to be complacent?

How many smart fat people and dumb thin people do you have to meet before you realise there's no correlation?

Or doesn't it even work like that? It's quite possible - even common - for a white person to show no racism at all to actual black people they know...but to be casually racist about black people in the abstract.

Why do we expect "crazy" people to be bigots...but expect people with "mental health problems" to be tolerant - even wise and serene? Sometimes a name change really does make all the difference - between a negative stereotype and a positive one.

All the christians I know are fairly decent people - they just believe an invisible magic man in the sky will change the laws of nature for their convenience if they ask him hard enough. All the atheists I know are fairly decent people - they just have different delusions, sometimes about vitamin pills or the dignity of manual labour.

But all the batshit insane, hate spewing, deeply ignorant and fuckwitted people I meet on the internet...call themselves christians. And the ones who take them down with evidence and logic call themselves atheists.

Now, two thoughts:

(1) It's quite possible to hold an image of a group of people in your head, know it's not accurate, not treat the people as though the image were true, but still have the image.

(2) Some stereotypes are personal and idiosyncratic, stemming from individual experience.

For instance, there's an absurdly (wonderfully) large number of curry houses in this town, and the staff are almost all Bangladeshi - often from the same family.

There's a particular way they tend to behave to customers - smiling and welcoming, but somehow timid, almost camp. Result: that's how part of me expects everyone from Bangladesh to behave, though it's not a shock when they don't.

Of course, there are always people who like to tell you they're much too advanced to have national stereotype in their heads, and anyone who does must be a racist, and one step away from being a fascist sympathiser.

Leaving aside the illogic of that reasoning...I don't think I believe them. If they've lived for a year in Bangladesh and met lots of different kinds of people there, maybe they don't have a cartoon in their heads for that country. But what about Pakistan? Or Afghanistan? Or Iran?

Finally, sometimes I like the stereotypes people have of me. And sometimes I play up to them.

I'm European, so I'm sophisticated (but only if you're American). I'm British, so I've got the accent of a thousand supervillans from a lot of really corny films. I'm English, so I'm eccentric. And gay.

Though if I were disabled it seems I couldn't be gay anymore - but I might be nice.

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