On a non-TUG related topic I thought I would share with you a lesson I learned about stereotypes.
I was at a music festival on the weekend and one of the featured performers was the Melbourne Ska Orchestra. They encouraged people to come up to the front of the stage to dance. I was seated in the front row in order to get better photos of the performers so I also had a good vantage point from which to observe the dancers.
About three songs into their set two gorgeous young black girls, possibly sisters about 14 or 15 years old, came down the aisle and stood directly in front of me. They were tall, very dark, had long braided hair to their waists, were quite pretty and had well built bodies. I looked at them and thought to myself “now we are going to see some real dancing”.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. When they started to move it was pathetic. A man being electrocuted would have been more graceful. Their bodies twitched spastically while they shuffled their feet in a way that suggested they might fall over at any moment.
I live in a part of Canada where black people are few and far between and so my image of them has been molded mostly by the way blacks are presented in the media. I far as I knew they all had “funk in their souls” and could express it through their movements. I now know that I have been misled and should just each of them on their individual qualities as I would with anyone else.
The old adage “you can’t judge a book by its cover” has been around for a long time but it still holds true.