Topic of Basketaball and Stereotypes

Stereotypes contain a grain of truth.  They develop from a truth yet fallacy is inevitable.  People begin to apply this one truth as a general truth defining a whole body as if every case were the same.  Take the world basketball teams: The French team play like Liberal Democrats.  Like good socialists, they share the ball well.  However, they hesitate too much and seem to lack the confidence while they are overpowered by the brute force of the Americans.  Much like the American Democrats, the French were overpowered by the Americans, or the Republicans.  Thus, in general, do Americans act like Republicans.  The Puerto Rican fans were loud while the Chinese fans were less boisterous about their nation’s team.  While the Puerto Rican players flexed their muscles after they made a point, the Chinese seemed stoic and removed.  They resembled the caricature of the “passive Asian.”  The Americans often dunked and pushed the ball towards the basket.  If a player dunks he can just use his bulk and power to rush through others, where as a shot takes more calculation.  Since the Chinese shot often, which could indicate their lack of bulk, they rendered the “smart Asian” stereotype.  But, since stereotypes only retain a grain of truth, people must resist these stereotypes.  General truths can never flourish if people search for bits of truth.  However, people often take these bits of truths as general truths which is a grave mistake indeed.  Shall people accept part of a truth?  Frantz Fanon says “To speak…means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”  If cultural stereotypes will continue to flourish, this quote, above all, means that with the knowledge that others will expect the speaker to carry the weight of civilization, a person has a responsibility to reflect herself and thus, her culture in the best way possible.  But this projection, that a speaker will carry the weight of civilization, is has facilitated problems such as stereotyping. Relativism may be problematic but belief in the superficial and the ridiculous is no more beneficial.  People believe they can understand a culture from one person; yet, no one sees a leaf and says they understand the tree.




About Reef
Just living life the Karmalifee way!

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: