A guy in a pickup truck drove up to Christopher and a couple friends at their high school in the 80s. This is what he said:
Y’all got any blacks on your football team?
Everyone shook their head.
Then how can your team be any good?
Everyone was stunned by the stereotype, and the guy drove off.
The image in this week’s title image? Found a couple weeks ago by Christopher in an antique shop.
Whether it’s a drunken Irishman, a pasta-slinging Italian, or a cartoonish Native American mascot, stereotypes continue to live on. And that’s what we’re talking about this week.
We kick off the episode with the first stereotypes we ever remember hearing. From there, we jump to the most damaging stereotypes we’ve ever heard, before talking about if we’ve ever heard a stereotype that was proven right.
Next, we talk about where stereotypes come from, and why many have a need or compulsion to stereotype certain people. We also spend a couple minutes discussing if we’ve ever found stereotypes to be useful, and then pick a few groups we could be safely classified into and talk about how well we conform to the stereotypes of those groups.
Find out what the oddest stereotypes we’ve ever heard are — and if there was any merit to them.
In the final stretch of this week’s episode, we talk about how damaging stereotypes are…and why they continue to endure. Then we finish by talking about if we consider ourselves stereotypical in any way.
We’d love to hear your tales of stereotypes: the strangest stereotypes you’ve heard, whether you’ve found certain stereotypes to be true…anything you want to discuss down below in the comments.
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The only thing I’m sure of is gingers have no souls.
Since all that can be said about gingers is true, there was no need to cover it in this episode! 😉
One thing we didn’t talk about are the groups that are still okay to stereotype. Gingers…I don’t know if South Park brought back a rise of teasing redheads. I will still hear stereotyped Italians, Irish, and Asians in the occasional radio commercial. Rednecks are fair game. In sports, there are some teams that seems to just be like, “Hey, we’re the Kansas City Chiefs and we have an arrowhead on our helmets,” and then there are the Redskins, a team that might make the Cleveland Indians baseball team probably say, “Ya know…glad people are grilling them ’cause our mascot is almost as offensive as the image Christopher used in this particular episode of Men in Gorilla Suits!”
The French and British will always be portrayed as snooty…except when it’s British thugs, and then it’s bad accents and dirty trenchcoats (and fingerless mittens). Really, there are still so many groups still stereotyped in advertising and other places…Russians all drink and have no souls, Germans are a regimented hive mind trying to shed its past terrors on humanity. Throw in gender stereotypes and we could probably do several more episodes about this…
Just glad we agree that gingers have no souls! 😉
I was teased in school for being a redhead, it made me an easy target (along with being rail thin, uncoordinated, a loner, and poor). Years later, I was quite surprised to learn about “ginger” bashing in Britain and “Kick a Ginger Day” in some US schools. It was my introduction to the word “ginger” as a label for redheads.
I was never really aware that having red hair was worthy of torment. One of my best friends growing up had red hair. Outside of being called “Red” and “Walking Tampon” [the day he decided to wear white shoes, white pants, and a white shirt to junior high], he was generally left alone. It DID seem like tall, thin, female redheads were teased. At the same time, I know people who think redheads are the coolest!
I’m not sure I ever heard “Ginger” until that episode of South Park. Now it’s more common in the states, but the whole image of redheads being evil and strange and so many other things seemed so weird to me.