The Stereotype Highway

Greetings, Internet!

I'm pleased to say that I haven't completely drowned in homework. At least, not yet. I'm also somewhat pleased to say that I've given up trying to fix my font problems and I'm just going to go with the default font.

Tonight's post is in response to this article that was written by Kenji Yoshino, and originally appeared in the NY Times in January, 2006.

By the way, I'm skipping about 98% of the content of the article because this post is in response to a prompt based on this essay.

In this article, Yoshino talks about covering. Covering is when someone doesn't necessarily hide the fact that they are different, or part of some minority group, but changes the way they act to better assimilate into the mainstream of their society. However, Yoshino points out that the phrase "Mainstream" is rather vague, and, while it may be usable when talking about large groups of people and society as a whole, it is almost never applicable to individuals.

According to Yoshino, the phrase mainstream doesn't work because it isn't specific enough. Each person has so many adjectives associated with her or him that there is no way to discern whether or not each and every one of those adjectives is "standard", or the norm. Yoshino says that "It's not normal to be completely normal."

The essay only devotes one small paragraph to this, but I would like to pontificate further. What image do you see in your head when you hear "mainstream"? I think of an image kind of like this one, or, actually, more like this one. Interestingly, the second image looks startlingly like what a shattered LCD display looks like. But that's beside the point. Take a look at that second image. Now, imagine that you are a member of some group. For the moment, let's call that group Yellow. Notice that, in the picture, yellow is definitly more concentrated in the upper left hand side of the image. But there's yellow scattered all around the image, just in smaller quantities. And what's more, there's yellow in green, and yellow in orange, and many other colors as well. If mainstream is yellow, you can say that there is a certain area of the image that is mainstream (the area of the highest concentration of yellow). But looking at individual colors, you can't say where "yellow" is, because it's all over the place.

Apply the same lesson to "groups", and there you have Yoshino's point.

Flackle.