Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, April 24, 2002
10:08 - Look out, Itchy! He's Irish!	(top)
Have you noticed that some racial stereotypes seem to be inextricably with us and are widely regarded as "okay", even by their targets? I call to witness the Irish stereotype. It just doesn't fit with the stereotypes we consider "bad" today-- the Irish are white, after all. When I was a little kid, I knew what "Black" was, and I knew what "Mexican" was. But I didn't know what "Irish" was, nor "Jewish". As far as I could tell, they were just more flavors of Miscellaneous. The Irish stereotype survived well into this century, largely as the Irish Cop in WB cartoons and Broadway musicals. Go take a look at Cap'n Wacky's Unfortunate St. Patrick's Day Cards from earlier this century to see what it used to be like. But today, perhaps because immigration from Ireland is no longer a "problem", all we have left from it is the Lucky Charms leprechaun mascot, and self-conscious jocularity like what The Simpsons does on a regular basis. "Whacking Day was invented as an excuse to beat up the Irish!" "Oy, 'tis true! Oy took many a lump. But 'twas all in good fun!" And the mockery is all in good fun, too, it seems. Somehow we've moved beyond that particular stereotype making fun of people, and instead it makes fun of itself. All the stereotype is targeting now is the Irish stereotype. The same thing has happened, to a lesser extent, with Italians. We still have the Mafia-fascination that makes The Sopranos a hit, and Hollywood knows they'll never flop with a mob movie as long as they throw in Robert de Niro and Billy Crystal or something. (Yeah, yeah, I liked Analyze This.) There's still some general slicked-back pointedness about Italians as portrayed in the media, something of the old-style stereotyping that hasn't yet moved on to the recursive "meta-stereotyping" style. But I suppose time will bring that about just as it did with the Irish. But what about blacks? Hell, we've come a long way. We've got stereotypes now, but they're squarely in the latter category-- almost over-the-top in that direction, as a matter of fact. The Black stereotype is such an overcompensation for past wrongs that it's a very flattering one. The contrast is astonishing. It's been decades since we've seen the "doan' hurt me, massah" kind of thing we can see in Jerry on the Job, an early-part-of-the-century daily strip thoughtfully archived for posterity by (who else?) Lileks. No, what we have now is sort of a Shaft/Samuel L. Jackson montage-- a self-assured, swaggering, pimpin' 70s sex machine. It's the Chef of South Park. It's the Green Lantern of Justice League. It's a stereotype that's about the diametric opposite of what it once was, and so it's even beyond being a parody of itself. It's a creation of the media. It's a product of our collective guilt. It's affirmative action for stereotypes. This has happened because the lot of blacks in America has been particularly grievous, and so it's our immediate first choice when we decide we must do something about racial prejudice. But it seems to me that the "melting pot" is still working; multiculturalism is a fad, and miscegenation continues as our intra-cultural borders dissolve. One day we'll have a lot more meta-stereotypes like the current Irish, Scottish, and Australian ones that we toss about with such abandon today-- and a lot fewer of the direct ones that actually offend people.