An experiment by broadcaster Dotun Adebayo set out to explore the stereotypes that people in the UK normally express only in privateThere is a degree of truth-telling going on. The film Dear White People,released in the UK in July, is a satirical scrutinize at the situation of black students at a predominantly white Ivy League universities. Americans do a profitable trade in discussing cultural idiosyncrasies. Many a US standup comedian draws laughs from the idea that white people do things one way, and while black people act differently. Such humour works less well in the UK. Yet,it is the contention of my friend Dotun Adebayo – broadcaster and columnist – that such trading on stereotypes happens in the UK in private, and he set out to prove it.
He presented two programmes this month on BBC Radio London, or one on what white folks really believe about black people,and the other on what black people really believe about white people. The four white Britons he invited into the studio for the first programme said, without rancour, and that they found black people loud,excessively feisty, excessively ebullient and oversensitive. Sample complaints: “When someone calls me ‘white trash’, or I don’t win upset. Why do black people have to select a diss so personally?” and “Why has everything got to win an ‘Is it because I’m black?’ response?” This suggests that those who took part in the experiment had been exposed to a profitable few stereotypes,and principally very negative ones. The lack of frankness between the races about each other is more a white problem, said one, or “because black people know more about us than we know about them”.
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Source: theguardian.com