Commentary on stereotype and the ethics of representation

What a hot topic this one is!

Avoiding stereotype is something I’ve been really concerned with for a long time, whether it’s in work that I make or just in my day-to-day life. I’ve gotten into a lot of arguments with family members over whether it’s okay to be wary of all black people being thieves because of a couple of negative experiences, or whether it’s okay to make jokes about the ‘rich miserly jew’ stereotype. in particular my mother loves to pull out the phrase ‘all stereotypes are based in a grain of truth’ to justify using them. However, even if this were to be true, the fact remains that stereotype in the hands of people who are not a part of those groups loses its sense of truth and instead becomes a weapon of dehumanization. Whatever truth may have existed in stereotypes has been warped into a flat exaggeration that doesn’t truly exist in any one person and is applied to all people of the same group. This is what stereotypes do— they flatten, they make things easier for people to understand, and they make real human being easier to dismiss as all being the same.

American Born Chinese does a spectacular job of breaking apart the negative impact that cultural/racial stereotypes can have on people. Yang uses extreme Chinese stereotype to drive home a point— something he has the authority to do because he is from that group. The narratives he chooses to call back to are used with a purpose, and because they come from his personal life they’re handled with a subtlety and depth that an outsider simply could not accomplish even if they tried to use the same technique. This book is one of the most compelling arguments I could possibly use against people who argue that using stereotypes is totally harmless.

As for the use of stereotype in a more generalized sense— commonly accepted shorthand used to represent character ‘types’ in order to make the absorption of a story faster— I can see why illustrators and comics artists would rely on these, but I’m also incredibly wary of them because they inherently limit the readers’ ability to fully empathize with characters as complex human beings. In turn, this encourages the stereotyping of people in real life, which flattens the people all around us into shadows of what they represent rather than the infinitely varying combination of traits that they actually have. This isn’t to say that humans can’t be categorized so much as to say that relying on categorization to make life ‘readable’ is a dangerous endeavor and one that deserves to be seriously reconsidered and abandoned whenever possible. It’s far more exciting to surprise people.