Here's the Original Post. It can't be read properly because it was stretched out by the Donkey spam on the previous page:
Griff wrote:
Okay, I was sitting in a Waffle House, chattering with the security guard for a couple of minutes during the slow hours. The subjects of "crazy" and "marriage" came up, and I happened to mention, "Yeah, I've seen it first-hand. My room-mate's live-in fiance. You know what they say about 'latin tempers,' right? She's the epitome of it!" Well, I didn't think anything of it as I was saying it, mainly because everything I'd ever heard on the subject had come from people of that self-same ethnicity, none of whom (except for the one I was referring to) seemed to have an angry bone in their bodies. However, the security guard seemed to reject that statement straight-out, saying, "that's racial profiling. Stereotyping," and he pretty much cut the conversation right there. I was a little put-off for a minute or two because I'd never gotten such a rapid shut-off before on that kind of remark. I'd meant it partially in jest, anyway. I thought about it for a while, though, and something occurred to me: it actually would be valuable for a security guard or police officer to be evasive of that kind of speech. Late at night, a Waffle House can get pretty rough, which is probably why about half the people who work there look like either mental patients or whipped dogs, and if a fight were to break out there, the security guard would have to be able to remember the events exactly as they happened, NOT as he would expect for them to happen. That is, even though that "profiling" statement I made might have seemed harmless in everyday discussion, you have to remember that, when recalling a scene, we don't recall it in its exactitude. We reconstruct it based upon similar experiences, sometimes substuting for details based on what we EXPECT to be there. For example, if you take someone into your typical office, give them ten seconds to look around, and then ask them to describe everything they saw in it, odds are pretty high they'd put a few things on the list that were not actually there. Here's a scene: say a Latvian man were trying to throw a punch at a Lithuanian, and the Lithuanian were to throw out his arm to block so forcefully as to break the Latvian man's wrist. If the security guard had always heard talk of Lithuanians tending to "lash out irrationally," this is how he would form his reconstruction of the events when describing them to a police officer. When the police officer asked, "did the Lithuanian intend to put up a block or to lash out in anger," the security guard is going to reconstruct his recollection of the event based at least partially upon what he expects a Lithuanian to do in any given situation.
As such, is so-called "political correctness" somewhat justified in some cases?
And, for your information, I don't have anything against latinos or latinas. I was just parroting what I've heard, ironically, from a particular latina friend. Another such irony is that I didn't even know anti-semitism still existed until I'd hung out with some of my boyfriend's family, all Reform Jews, and I would never have BELIEVED there could be such a rich vocabulary for denoting such a small group of people. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. Wait...I'm not Dorothy, am I? Oh, yeah, she was the one who had that Hawaiian Island tan, right? The one you had to kinda squint at kinda funny to see her internal organs? Anyway, I really wish this stuff made more sense.
12 May 2008, 4:48 pm
