Stereotypes can be convenient, ugly things.
Sometimes we don’t want to acknowledge the fact that people are complicated. We don’t always like seeing each other as complex human beings who have more sides to them than we comprehend.
So we instead construct neat little boxes to put one another into – the better to categorize you, my dear. When we don’t understand someone, we like to slap a label on the person and file away that individual. We really don’t like it when these boxes we build to our own specifications are too small for those we’re trying to corral into them. So we try to shove their heads in there, slamming on the lids and sitting on top of our own overstuffed suitcases of denial.
Obviously, this problem is two-sided. We stuff others into suitcases, and we’re stuffed into them in turn. So how do we respond when others have misunderstood us?
Two examples come to mind: America’s sweetheart Taylor Swift and current sex symbol Kim Kardashian.
In Taylor Swift’s new music video for her hit single “Blank Space,” she presents an exaggerated picture of herself. She acts as a hyperbolic version that makes fun of the media’s description of her as a crazed ex-girlfriend who only dates men so she can break up with them and then pen multimillion-dollar songs in their honor.
In the Gatsby-esque video, Swift dates a man only to break up with him when she suspects him of texting another woman. She paints portraits of him, rides (and impressively stands upon) horses and generally frolics around her mansion with him only to send him running, spitting apple pulp all the way. She stabs a wedding cake with intense ferocity, dents his car with a golf club and drops his cellphone into her mansion’s pool, effectively mimicking the distraught ex whom much of America seems to think she is.
It’s evident in YouTube’s comment section that many viewers didn’t understand the hyperbole and believe Swift is simply fulfilling the stereotype they created for her. However, by portraying the stereotype on screen, Swift effectively dismantled it by showing the world how ridiculous it was.
Kardashian took a different approach to her public image, choosing to let the media’s stereotype of her appear on Paper Magazine’s front page. She gave in to the world’s belief that her body was the only part of her worth displaying. According to an article by Blue Telusma on thegrio.com, Kardashian’s picture was imitating a racially degrading pose shot over 30 years ago.
“The original shot is of a black woman standing in front of a blue wall while she pops champagne into a glass placed on her rear end. And it’s from a book entitled [sic]: Jungle Fever,” Telusma said.
Telusma goes on to say that Kardashian was imitating a stereotype that is extremely toxic.
“But something tells me Kim probably has no clue about the cultural and historic significance of what she’s done,” Telusma said. “Instead, she probably just thought it would be cool to do an edgy photo shoot with [a] famous photographer. And many of you have fallen for that oversimplified stance as well.”
To stereotype people is to shackle them to your own misunderstanding, but what’s worse than shackling people is convincing them that they’ve enslaved themselves. Once those people start believing they are whom we say they are, those chains can become nearly impossible to break.
While it’s a nice idea to just stop stereotyping people, the problem is that we often create those boxes subconsciously. Unfortunately, stereotypes have become so engrained within us that we frequently don’t even realize when we’re using them.
The first step is to recognize when we are labeling other people by who we want them to be. We must stop seeing people how we want to see them and instead start seeing them for who they are. We can’t define one another anymore by who we think they are or we want them to represent for us. We must start defining each other by how God defines us: unworthy receivers of grace and love that goes outside any box. That’s true for Swift and Kardashian as well.