Teacher's Lounge

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

The PBI Index

I have devised a new strategy towards gaining acceptance, but first let me premise it with the statement that I believe in evolution. A nagging question with this belief is tied to the evidence that the first man evolved in Africa. What does this mean to the average citizen? Are Africans somehow inferior because we evolved first? Are Africans somehow endowed with ape or chimp like characteristics? I think about our cousin the ape, and notice his strength; I see myself and am often perplexed by my own effortlessly sculpted physique while listening to the complaints of my Caucasian counterparts. I tread on very dangerous waters, I am sure by making these statements, but the question nags. Plus I have carte blanche with that bill of rights document.
Recently, there was an arrest and release of a prominent Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates. The media and Gates played against each other in a game of words where the media attempted to sensationalize a "racial profiling" meets a Nobel laureate scholar scenario. I don’t think Gates is a Nobel laureate, but you can catch my drift. Even Barak Obama got into the fray before somebody important to him thought he might have stuck his foot in his mouth with his initial "the police acted stupidly" response. So I am left to wonder what really went down that day, while trying to keep an open mind. I hate prejudice, even within myself, so I try to detach all analysis from a race perspective, and exist as a colorless observer, not tainted by my own ethnocentric experience.
I often hear that white people derisively refer to African people as monkeys. I hear that they throw bananas at us when we take the field in soccer aka football games. Why the hate? Studies have shown monkeys to be superior to college educated humans in certain cognitive functions.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/12/young-chimp-bea.html . I get the connection with the bananas, black people are simian and monkeys eat bananas, so therefore we must love bananas..yea yea yea.....I personally think the banana, called the fruit of the wise, is an excellent food, stocked full of potassium and essential for healthy brain function. Potassium assists in the sending and receiving of messages between brain cells thus promoting an optimal cerebral environment. So great, keep those bananas pouring out of the bleachers you racist hooligans, yea you, over there in the Chelsea jersey. Think I can't see you? But I digress.
A Boston Police officer was placed on administrative leave pending a termination hearing because an email he sent out was leaked in which he called professor gates a "jungle monkey" whose "belligerence" was deserving of a face-full of "mace". Again we are called monkeys, but why? Does America know us to eat bananas? Do we Africans consume the most bananas per capita?
So I am on a campaign, because I don't want my daughter to hear someone calling her father a monkey, as I am certain it would be damaging to her psychic well being. I am not going to eat bananas in public. I am, in effect, going to decrease my own PBI Index. I am going to improve my "Public Banana Intake" index. I think it behooves all Africans and people of even marginal African descent to improve their own PBI index so that we will not be derided and humiliated in such a dehumanizing manner. By no means will I cease eating bananas outright, I will only try to cut down on how many bananas in eat in the public eye.

4 Comments:

At 10:18 PM, Blogger SSDD said...

I basically think you got this wrong, but let me entertain it for a second by stating: I definitely believe that the association between black people and apes is a real problem with real (life-or-death) consequences. Take, for example, a 2008 study by Goff et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

[The] Black–ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized.... When controlling for the total number of articles, defendant socioeconomic status, victim socioeconomic status, aggravating circumstances, mitigating circumstances, and crime severity, Black defendants who were put to death were more likely to have apelike representations in the press ... than were those whose lives were spared.... Black defendants are more likely to be portrayed as apelike in news coverage than White defendants and that this portrayal is associated with a higher probability of state-sponsored executions.

Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, and Jackson. "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2008, Vol. 94, No. 2, 292–306.

So, yeah, the association between blacks and apes is a real issue worthy of real attention. The question of whether we should curb a healthful behavior in some deliberate effort to prevent or combat that association is a different question.

As you state yourself, bananas are good for cognition. I think the best way for black people to combat perceptions linking us to beasts is precisely to become better thinkers. You are proposing that we avoid an action that would tend to make us better thinkers (eating bananas) and lead us to naturally and, in a sort of mutually beneficial way, combat the black-beast association.

Also, and maybe more importantly, we would be allowing the black-ape association to exercise power over us by letting it keep us from doing something that could actually benefit us as individuals. Taking a certain action just to avoid being stereotyped seems to me just as bad as fulfilling a stereotype just because you think that's what you're supposed to do. Either way, you're letting the stereotype control your behavior.

 
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