Tom Thirkill-Kirk 💙 retweetledi
bell hooks said that White people will meet a Black person who completely challenges every racial stereotype that they have, but rather than giving up the stereotypes, they create a special category for that person and say, things like “Well, you’re not like other Black people”, instead of saying, “My ideas of Black people were too narrow”.
This is called “subtyping” and it leads to the survival of negative stereotypes because the new category individual who’s supposedly “not like the others” is mentally isolated from the group.
What this shows is that bigotry is all about protecting an existing hierarchy and it doesn’t matter much whether a person is exposed to other people or not. Which is why meeting intelligent, kind, accomplished, or complex Black people does not dismantle prejudice if someone is emotionally invested in keeping the stereotype intact.
Exposure to facts and figures doesn’t change the situation either. Someone can know the statistics on crime, education, poverty, or discrimination and still keep racial stereotypes because the stereotype preserves a sense of superiority and avoids confronting historical responsibility.
This is part of why bell hooks further argued that racism is emotional and ideological more than just purely ignorant, which is then why facts by themselves usually do not overcome a worldview that a person is motivated to preserve.
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