Ink Spots and Negotiating Stereotypes

"For so great is the influence of mind upon mind, so compelling the mimesis between action and actor, that we are perpetually in danger of becoming our stereotypes; yet without stereotype we have no way to negotiate the difficult passage between psyche and society. Like other projections, stereotype is the object of the soul's effort to make itself known to itself. And, like other projections, it is no mere chimera."


I really responded to “The Ink Spots” article because I have felt awkward in similar situations myself over the years. I think it is almost impossible for us to not oversimplify, assigning attributes and labels to other people. We put people in boxes, often unintentionally and with no ill will, because we have no other way to organize. We have way too much information to process in our day-to-day lives and we have no other way of keeping track.

I think, like this article explores, it is not our impulse to stereotype that is the problem, it is our ignorance of when we do. For example, visiting the American Folklife Festival and feeling that sort of “we are all one community, let’s hold hands and sing” feeling without thinking good and hard about the power dynamics that exist and the associations we bring to the table even if we at heart have an attitude that welcomes and respects diversity.

I thought to myself about an “Undoing Racism” workshop that I went to years ago that left me deeply discomforted. The majority of the people attending the conference were white and in their early twenties. There was one Latina leader, one African-American leader and the rest were older white men and women. There was this air of “we are all so good for looking at race and we CAN undo racism.” But the fact was that everything about the workshop was reductive. We can trace the history of racism and stand around and sing old slave spirituals like “Wade in the Water” (seriously, this happened), but that doesn’t mean we are looking deeply at the issues or at the individuals at the table and how they have experienced race in their lives. Furthermore, the materials excluded the African-Americans in attendance. There was a handout called “how to speak to a person of color,” effectively “othering” people of color and acting as if there were some special rules to speak to “all” people of color. In this diversity workshop, it seemed there was more obvious stereotyping and perpetuating of stereotypes than I witnessed in my everyday life.

At one point, one of the African-American attendees fed up with the process said he would like to have a roundtable at lunch about how he felt that the way the workshop was proceeding was hindering, rather than helping, workshop attendees in understanding each other and the impact of race on interactions.

Ironically, the more significant and culturally valuable experience came after the workshop when my friends and I were traveling back from St. Louis to New Orleans. My friends Josh and Michael and I stopped at a Subway at a reststop to eat dinner. It was late at night, maybe 11 p.m., and we were discussing the workshop and our own personal struggles and insights in relationship to it. As we did, we noticed an African-American man about our age sweeping the floor near our table. It appeared that his ears perked up. Eventually he came over and told us he was sorry but he had overheard. Why was it we were talking about issues of race and what was this workshop we had attended?

He told us that he had recently been to training at the Highlander School, and he asked to join us at our table. Then we had a conversation about our experiences. This moment of meeting, under no pretense of “Undoing Racism,” did more than the workshop because the four of us were able to see each other as people rather than entities, as individuals instead of stereotyped groups. Obviously, even in such circumstances, we all bring our preconceived notions about those “different” than us in one way or another, but here there wasn’t the falsity of “can’t we all just get along.”


Lisa