STEREOTYPING INDIANS FOSTERS RACISM
My 5-year-old son, who still accepts adult words and ideas as unfailingly
pure and honorable, came home from kindergarten the other day and asked
me to make him an "Indian" hat. He explained that an Indian hat was a
string or band tied around his head with a feather in it, and lots of
feathers designated a chief.
I told my son that I had met a fair number of Indians, from a variety of
tribal backgrounds, and that, like everyone else, they wore all kinds of
hats - or no hats - but never headbands with feathers unless they were
acting in a play about hunters and fighters from the old days.
It's a conversation we've had before. Almost certainly, we'll have it again.
Teachers, toys, cartoons, movies and books persent my children with a
cultural taxonomy in which pink brown and tan people are truck drivers,
mothers, cooks, dental hygienists, firefighters and doctors. But Indians
are always, well, Indians. Undifferentiated by cultural group or
historical period, Indian images drift around us on everything from bank
logos to car names to holiday centerpieces, eliciting barely a murmer of
recognition, let alone protest.
It grieves me. The concrete, lived racism these images reflect grieves me.
The ease with which people lock a group of humans into the airless box of
an ahistorical stereotype grieves and frightens me. (Once we cut one
group out of the magic circle of those we see as human, how hard can it
be to excise others?) The effort my children and I will expend unlearning
damaging, dehumanizing inaccuracies grieves me.
The presentation of Indian images intensifies in the fall with Columbus
Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Parents who would be at a loss to
produce a costume for a child who wanted to trick or treat as a European
(What country? they would ask) have no trouble outfitting their little
ones as Indians. Teachers who would never think of presentingall the
women they mention dressed in 18th century styles, don't question lesson
plans that do just this to Indians.
A box of toys identifies all the charactors inside by job - captian,
magician, wizard, detective - except one that is just called Indian. The
trusting minds of children drink in these images. The distancing,
dehumanizing stereotypes are reconstructed in a new generation.
I don't romanticize Indians. Their cultures and individuals within them
are not inherently better or worse than others. Nor is their suffering
as a minority group measurably greater or less than any other group.
But the directness and intensity of stereotyping about Indians is
shocking. It is an affront to their humanity, and it eats away at the
humanity of all of us who live with it unblinking, unprotesting. Our
acceptance of it makes it easier to swallow other stereotypes, other acts
and words and beliefs that distance us from other groups of people.
Acceptance of racism makes all racism easier for the racist to accept and
even defend.
So what did I say to my son? I told him I would make him a hunter hat,
and I told him that we would learn together about all the different kinds
of hats worn by different kinds of hunters and fighters throughout history.
He agreed to that, but he is 5 and he also wanted to dress up as
something right then and there. So we transformed the string he had
brought for his headband into a cast on his arm. He became both doctor
and patient simultaneously, and then turned into a charactor from a
recently read book and was off into his own world.
It's his own world, but a world constructed of images we have given him.
In so many ways, we adults shape the future in which our children will
live, both concretely and philosophically. We must take great care.
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