Opinion
 ............................

They use the generalized racial stereotype to justify discrimination.

The rule of the generalized racial stereotype allows anybody in the white majority to project the conduct of one or a few Black Americans as character traits for all members of the group. Then, they can justify granting or withholding human rights and economic opportunity based on those generalized characteristics.

Dodger President Branch Rickey selected Robinson to sign as the first Black American baseball player in MLB, because he showed the capacity to absorb racial slurs without visible reaction. Rickey knew those type slurs were coming, because another part of the generalized racial stereotype tactic is that society only judges the character of the minority group member during racial group interactions.

Someone might argue that we should overlook how MLB used the generalized racial stereotype, because it led to a positive result. However, any use of this degrading social practice is harmful. It denies an identity to members of the Black American and other minority groups as rational humans with individual traits. It continues the presumption that nonwhite Americans must continuously prove their worth and right to equal economic opportunity. In addition, it reinforces unfair standards and reliance on racial stereotypes as permissible social policy. While the Dodgers and MLB used this tactic to desegregate professional baseball, U.S. Armed Forces commanders used it to continue racial segregation.

The only effective and moral way to end racial segregation is to declare it illegal and to make equal opportunity the law of the land. It may seem that I judge 1947 social practices with current ideas. However, President Truman issued a 1948 executive order installing a no segregation policy of equal opportunity in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The state of New Jersey adopted a constitution in 1947 guaranteeing equal opportunity for all citizens against being racially or ethnically segregated in any area. This was the same year MLB used the generalized racial stereotype as a policy. Two years later New Jersey desegregated its schools and its National Guard. I know this because I left a segregated school the summer of 1950 and returned to a desegregated school that fall. It was that simple in my school district. The New Jersey experience shows that it was not all White Americans, but prejudiced White Americans who embraced the policy of the generalized racial stereotype.

Many people still support the social policy of generalizing racial stereotypes to minority groups. Affirmative action and the federal Leave No Child Behind program grow from this idea. This idea of the generalized racial stereotype is obvious in many of the claims people make defending the Don Imus remark that called members of Rutgers University women basketball team hos. The crux of their arguments is that Don Imus, any White Americans male, can select any remark made by any group of Black American males, in this case rappers, and indiscriminately report it as a character trait for any of America's twenty million Black American females. They rely on the crudest form of the generalized racial stereotype.

It gets worse. Some people claim Imus copied Black American rappers’ use of ho, but they refuse to listen to Rap musician Snoop Dog’s explanation for its use. They dismiss his explanation as ridiculous logic, hypocritical, and too vulgarly expressed to have meaning. Snoop Dog explained, "[Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about ho's that's in the 'hood that ain't doing (blank)-, that's trying to get a (blank) for his money. These are two separate things.”

The logic is clear to me. He says clearly that rappers call only call those women hos in their neighborhood who accomplish nothing, but use sexual wiles to leech money from men they care nothing about. His expression is sexist, but no more so than American expressions with similar meanings like whore, gold digger, tramp, and trophy-wife.

Imus defenders should quote a passage from one of Snoop Dogs’ songs that conflict with this explanation to prove him a hypocrite, if he is one. I suspect they are afraid to look, or refuse to admit his explanation is sincere, because then it would they, Imus and others of us in society who generalized “ho” as racial stereotype to all Black American females.

I’m willing to accept his explanation until facts prove him wrong, no matter his other character traits.

Kenneth Brooks is a freelance writer and speaker. Contact him at P.O. Box 882, Vallejo, CA 94590. E-mail to: opinion@ethicalego.com.