The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Sex, Race, and Stereotypes

I can't help myself: I have to weigh in on the the New Yorker cover in which the Obamas are drawn as terrorists (one homegrown, one international). Yes, the cover was a veeeery feeble attempt to satire the right-wing response to the Obama's televised fist bump. Yes, they have the right to run a cover like that. But it makes me feel a little sick.

I appreciate, Kim, your big yawn about the controversy. But the cover does matter, and no one seems to understand why. Not because the cover is Good or Bad for the Obama Campaign, which is none of my business. Rather, in displaying these images, The New Yorker reinscribes ugly stereotypes that are already etched deeply into our mind. It doesn't matter that the magazine's or cartoonist's intent was satirical. The cover "activates" certain points of view and thereby strengthens them.

That's just how stereotypes work, as social psychologists have been discovering in amazing depth and detail for the past 20 years. Our minds are always, below our awareness, automatically slotting perceptions of the world around us into categories. Just as your growing brain learned that (say) birds have wings but lizards don't—which is why pterodactyls are so thrillingly boundary-breaking—so it also soaked up all sorts of ugly categories that you may consciously reject. Go take one of these short online tests if you think you don't have any unconscious beliefs about one group or another: If you're human, you can't help it. Our busily categorizing brains more easily gather up any information that reinforces unacknowledged categories and rejects information that doesn't fit.

And those powerful, pre-installed concepts really do affect how we behave. Consider Claude Steele's well-documented concept of "stereotype threat," in which activated stereotypes lead some groups to underperform. For instance, in one experiment, when one group of students were told that women and men did equally well on a particular math test, they did score equally well; when a matched group of students were subtly reminded of the belief that men are better at math ("I'm sure you girls will do fine"), the women scored lower on that test.

So what? So when The New Yorker runs a cartoon showing Barack Obama (with his suspect name) as a Muslim terrorist and Michelle Obama as the classic angry black woman, as Angela Davis/Jackie Brown, it reinforces both those neural pathways in our brains—no matter how sophisticated and satirical we readers may be. Arabic name = Muslim terrorist. Black woman = gun-toting rage. Like that horrifying New Republic cover (which I refuse to link to) of Hillary Clinton as shriekingly hysterical, it tosses dirt into our minds, making the world a little uglier. It works the way a catchy song does, a song that worms into your head and unexpectedly becomes your soundtrack for a week: You can't help it; it's just there, whispering to you in the background. That New Yorker cover, sitting on newsstands in airports across the country, is doing the dirty work of the tribal mind.

(Note for nerds: Click here for a famous and influential Law Review article about how the fact of these unacknowledged mental categories should be dealt with in the law. The social science has gotten more sophisticated since, but the concepts are the same.)