Stereotypes exist for a reason. They allow us easy access
to a wide range of reflexive responses, eliminating the need for reasoned
analysis:
- Hear a Scottish voice and expect to be informed in tedious detail exactly what they want us, the English, to pay for.
- A Liverpool accent alerts us to tune out and avoid listening to the imagined anti-Scouse cultural injustice they are protesting today.
- At the first guttural syllables of a third-generation, still unintegrated Pakistani ‘community spokesman’ I brace myself for the multiple charges of islamophobia that are surely coming.
- And when I hear the blunt, dead vowels of a South Yorkshire denizen I cringe in sheer embarrassment at the thought of being a Yorkshireman although, to be fair, only the north and west of that great county is truly god’s own.
If you think those stereotypes lazy, here’s a beauty.
The laziest of all stereotypes is the positively bone-idle example of a hooded,
tattooed thug, parked on the sofa, smoking skunk and scratching his all-too
fertile balls in front of always-on reality TV, living a life free of worry,
free of effort and free of all responsibilities. You can actually picture this
right now and that's because these people do exist. The people who made them,
however, will bend all the laws of the human universe to deny it. But it makes no
difference because a stereotype is also a pattern, a mould, into which
many of us have been poured and left to set, to conform to type.
Stereotypes act as handy ciphers to aid understanding and
prepare our defences – see a crop-haired, androgynous, chunky female on the television
and I don’t need to be told I am going to hear about wimmin’s rights and general
lefty issues with a touch of anti-Zionist sentiment tossed in for good measure;
oh and ‘men’. It alerts me to the need to find another avenue of entertainment and
so avoid having to listen to tired and irrational arguments about misogyny,
racism and the evils of the very free-speech, capitalist society that gives her
the freedom to practice her free-preaching.
One of the truths about a stereotype is an inability in
many to rise above the programming. So when I heard about Donald Trump
cancelling his Chicago rally because of violent protesters I didn’t need the telly
to picture the general dusky hue and temperament and political persuasions of
the multi-culti rent-a-mob; it's just the same over here. It’s interesting though, when the islamists make common cause
with the lefties to protest against a third party stereotype.
This is a dangerous act, for without the Trumps, who will defend the left and
their pets when islam takes over and sharia reigns?
