The Black History Museum

Stereotyping - is it always wrong?
Should different races aim to be alike, or preserve their differences? What differences? Should we pretend we’re all the same, even if we’re not? A very personal view by Richard D North, this site’s editor.

It seems absurd to ask, “What are black people like?” But since to be black is to be in a category, not least in official censuses, there are presumably some characteristics it captures. Maybe the answer is as neutral as this: blacks are like everyone else. They are just a race which come from Africa. So they have some physical characteristics in common, like any other race. But why wouldn’t there be some cultural features as well? Has Africa left a unique imprint? Or has a history of bondage?

There is some point asking what the English (or Americans, the French) are like. They are bit different from each other. Why wouldn’t that be true of “the Blacks”? You may reply that to be black is to have an ethnic background (a skin tone), and no more, and that black people have every right to be thought of as “normal” English (or American or French). They have a right to insist that we ignore their ethnicity - or to call their ethnicity “English”, or whatever. That’s got a lot going for it.

Still, the question has to be asked, even if the answer is that there is no difference. Anyway, people are constantly being invited to be proud of their identity, and that includes their black identity if they’re black. So is there a black identity? The idea that black Americans are “proud to be black” and insist on being called “African-American” implies that there ought to be. Otherwise, why bother with the distinction?

It is unfair but true that there is much more material about how whites identify blacks than about how blacks think about themselves. It was mostly the whites who wrote the books, made the advertisements, produced the models, painted the pictures, which give us our images of black people.

The Black History Museum provides ample evidence that black people have been portrayed as happy-go-lucky, funky, sexy, jazzy. They have not been portrayed as academic, entrepreneurial, or as classical musicians. The Museum almost exclusively features images of black people as whites wanted to be thought to be portraying them. In private, or amongst themselves, or when they could get away with it, white people often thought of black people as being stupid, lazy, over-sexed, violent, innocent, hard-working and very caring (in the case of the black woman). Some white people have also admired black people as being courageous, patient and tough. This is especially true of white people who have known or thought about Africa.

To some extent, these portrayals – whether more or less friendly or outright vicious - are stereotypes. That’s to say: they are descriptions applied in bulk to black people as a group. They tend to collapse in the face of actually meeting a black person. That’s stereotypes for you.

If the white world could successfully hang these labels on black people, and it could, then whites could go on exploiting blacks, or ignoring them.

But we can very tentatively go a little further. Some of the stereotypes have some reality, and a reality which continues. Black people really do disproportionately feature as athletes and musicians and convicts. Black men also disproportionately feature as absentee fathers. We shouldn’t ignore these facts.

But they are not the same sort of facts. There may be all sorts of reasons why black people can run fast: biology and culture come into it. The same might be said of the way black people take to making music. There is a vigorous debate as to why too many black men father children but don’t help rear them and why too many young black boys fail at school and too many black men take to crime. But people don’t tend to argue that there is inherently, or biologically, any reason for the phenomena. It is assumed there is something wrong in the culture in which these black boys and men mature. Whether they are being failed by black culture or white culture is of course a matter of hot dispute.

There’s lots being said about these issues. It is relevant to this museum project to say that nowadays there is very little production of the kind of imaging of the black which fills this site. What was historically possible (cheerful, sometimes dismissive portrayal of black stereotypes) no longer is tolerated.

You may well say that’s a good thing. You may go on to say that the less we generalise about black people, the less we will risk worsening social problems which already trouble us.

Another response might be that this site shows that whites have seen “blackness” in all sorts of ways. They weren’t always especially honest ways. Now that whites are shy of portraying black people and black stereotypes, it is time for black people to portray themselves and discuss themselves in terms of their own devising. I’d say that is beginning to happen quite a lot and in very fruitful ways.