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12:31 p.m. - 2002-08-25
Stereotypes
I got my first real inkling of the power of stereotypes to control and manipulate when I was a young mom.

A group of parents in the community were very unhappy with the way the Public School Board was allocating resources to schools. The Board had decided to use a quadrant system where each quarter of the city got the same amount of resources and then they threw in extra cash for the higher income districts "because they have higher standards you know".

Where public education is concerned, there are supposed to be equally high standards for achievement regardless of race, creed, colour or income. In addition, many families who wanted to live within their means had chosen to live in our quadrant of the city so that they could put their families first instead of pouring all their income into bills. Ended up that our quadrant had three times the average child/youth population of the city but were getting only 25% of the resources. We wanted to see the Board allocate resources on a per child basis. Equity and equal aren't always the same thing.

Anyway a group of parents had been working on gathering the data necessary, doing the research on other education models that were successful, and preparing a presentation for the Board. Toward the end of the work we wanted to be sure we reflected community opinion and values so we held a town hall meeting to gather input. Everything was going well and we had received a lot of support when one man at the back stood up and asked who would be the spokesperson for the group. He volunteered himself although he had never contributed and knew nothing of the information we had collected and compiled. The key to the success of the presentation was going to be the presenters' ability to respond to questions about our research and conclusions and we told him so. His response was "Well real ladies don't speak in public and they don't interfere with politics - they just aren't smart enough". I don't know where it came from but what fell out of my mouth was "Well maybe real ladies don't but real moms do - we protect our children whatever the challenge". End of the discussion.

Truth was there was only one male in our group and we had all begged him to be the spokesman because none of us felt strong enough to carry the presentation. However, being that he was also a teacher it would have cost him his career. We literally drew straws and I and another mom were "it". Now, quite frankly, I would rather chew glass than speak in public and up to that point I had never participated in any debate on issues. This man's remarks made me so angry that I just kept reminding myself I was a real mom every time I got the quakes during the presentation. And yes we were successful.

In our community there were a lot of quality of life issues for families that weren't being addressed. The three levels of government in this province kept responding that we weren't worthy of our taxes being reinvested in our area because of our collective income levels, ethnicity, marital status (a lot of employed single moms)and even our faiths. The stereotypes were thrown at our children fast and furious with the intent of stifling debate and to rally public support for withholding resources on that basis.

We learned never to respond to those images. The press, bless them, published our research rather than the demographics which the governing bodies cited to "prove" we were lesser citizens than others living in the city. The true trouble with our area was that there wasn't a lot of profit to be made from us - we spent our disposable income on our families not the politicians and bureaucrats.

We learned a number of strategies, through trial and error, that made the stereotype weapon a liability for those employing it. Calling a behavior by its real name and drawing attention to the probable motives of the user were the most effective in the short term. However, the best in terms of long term education was drawn from a Freudian term (hate the discipline but some of the ideas are useful) called inflation. It means that you act out the stereotype to its most extreme point where it becomes a caricature of the other person's rhetoric. It takes time and a lot of inner strength to let yourself be portrayed that way, but it is very satisfying to get to the point where the stereotype "bursts" publicly because it can't be sustained. It is satire or lampooning at its best. I usually got to play out the "pregnant" stereotype because I usually was or the dumb housewife stereotype because my favorite comedienne was Gracie Allen who, as my Dad would say,was dumb like a fox. I liked pretending I was her character.

What brought me to this discussion Dear Diary? Well there was a profile of a new movie about to hit the theaters on TV last night. I didn't get the title but it is a comedy based on playing the stereotypes of Texan women against the stereotypes of French women - sort of a comedy of errors thing. Also, a friend who belongs to an ethnic group which is often the brunt of really vicious stereotypes made some really unkind remarks about another ethnic group again using stereotypes. I guess the strategy of Freudian inflation was on my mind.

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