While reading The Dartmouth on Monday, some friends and I found some interesting stereotypes in the various cartoons. My Jewish friend was offended by the fact that Herschel, a Jewish squirrel, is portrayed as being more ambitious and enterprising than his non-Jewish friend Sleazy, thus propagating the classic stereotype of the Jewish businessman. My female friend took offense because in "Bear Bones," it comes out that Bear's new girlfriend Jen is two-timing him; this effectively furthers the stereotype that women are loose, morally corrupt sex toys. Somewhat surprised (not to mention, while holding back huge peals of laughter), I warned them, "Be thou not so rash in thy accusations."
An identifiable pattern has been emerging the last few weeks in terms of scandals argued out in The Dartmouth. I'm talking about what I like to call the "Syndrome of Premature Assumption of Generalization" (SPAG, for short). When I think about Frank Aum's "Bear Bones-provoked Asian scandal" ["Negative Stereotypes in Bear Bones Have No Place in a Campus Newspaper," Jan. 13, 1997, The Dartmouth] and Michelle Kraemer's "Koala Joke Scandal" ["Weekend Update: Just a Joke?", Jan. 23, 1997], I can see a common feature which previous responses to these complaints have generally overlooked. In both cases, the accusers may have spoken too quickly in assuming the offensive material did in fact contain the alleged stereotypes.
For instance, in the first paragraph of this column, the Jewish friend instantly assumes that the presence of a Jewish squirrel implies that its every action is intended (by the cartoonist) to produce a generalization about Jews. Same thing with my female friend; she sees the actions of A GIRL in the strip as the cartoonist's comment on ALL GIRLS. The question of whether or not satire was intended is irrelevant at first, because its answer depends on whether or not we have an intended generalization in the first place; the question of intended generalization is primary.
The same assumptions may hold in the Asian and Koala cases. In the Asian case, "Bear Bones" creator David Berenson implied that he did in fact intend to present a generalization, by only addressing the question of satire at the public forum held in wake of the scandal. In that case, it appears that Frank Aum and the other Asian students were correct in assuming Berenson's intent to present an Asian stereotype (One can only ask, "Did Berenson intend it satirically?" after it's clear that there is an "it," a generalization, in the first place).
But in the koala case, Kraemer clearly jumped to the conclusion that this joke, which involves a koala bear and a prostitute, is intended as a comment on ALL WOMEN. To be fair, there was no author of this joke to explain the joke's general intent. Still, Kraemer succumbed to a more blatant version of SPAG by broadening the joke's meaning to even more absurd levels.
As Henry Broaddus points out in his letter to the editor ["In Humor, Everybody Plays the Fool; Sometimes a Joke is Just a Joke," Jan. 27, 1997], "...I'm not convinced that the particular prostitute is representative of an entire gender..." Neither am I. Obviously, the joke comments on what happens to a prostitute, but we can't readily expand that to any other people who share common traits with her.
Essentially, the SPAG syndrome consists of broadening the scope of a comment on one thing to include its superset(s) (Larger categories which contain the thing). Seeing a Jewish squirrel in the comic strip, my friend could have extended its meaning to all squirrels, or all Jews (sets which overlap in the case of Herschel), when all that's clear is that the episode only relates to Herschel. The Koala generalization is even worse than the Asian one because first the prostitute's treatment is broadened to include ALL prostitutes, and then ALL WOMEN (Climbing up two supersets, as opposed to one in the Asian case).
While I can understand doing the opposite (extending meaning to subsets), SPAG is often completely unjustified. Of course, jokes which begin, "Why did the [insert group here] ..." are intended as stereotypical humor. In other cases, more care must be taken, or else the author's intent may be misconstrued.
Clearly, we owe the wonders of SPAG in part to American society at large. We live in a culture of generalizations, of bite-size adages and quotations which appear to make life a little easier. The main thing SPAG demonstrates is our societal bias towards generalization.
Of course, we shouldn't write off generalizations completely. (The declaration, "All generalizations are false!" contradicts itself.) They are often useful when describing a general pattern which truly holds. But when we blindly jump the gun in accusing someone else of stereotyping, we risk revealing our own simplistic assumptions.
