[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So there’s some political stuff in LA about a council member. I’ll let you expound on this one because it’s so crazy it had to have happened in America.
Rick Rosner: Yeah, okay. So the LA City Council, city government has just been riddled with just mouth fees and some corruption lately and the latest thing is that the president of the LA City Council had to resign. Even Biden told her to resign after she was caught on tape talking with some of her cohorts and she compared the African-American son of another council member, said he was like a little monkey and I will go on record here saying something that could get me in trouble. I have checked IDs in bars for 25 years and I scrutinized the faces and IDs of about three quarters of a million people and I got to say that there are more white people who look like monkeys than black people. A white person’s more likely to resemble a monkey but that’s not the point. I would say that most stereotypes about black people, at least most old-school stereotypes that have persisted since the 19th century are excuses for being in charge of black people.
Black people don’t particularly look like monkeys; the idea is that by comparing them to monkeys you’re saying that they are… I mean most of these excuses take the form of black people are mentally inferior and it’s better for everybody if we’re in charge of them. So most old-school black stereotypes I believe are justifications for slavery. The stereotype that black people like fried chicken, watermelon, and grape soda and at first thought it’s like what you’re saying that black people like food that’s delicious; what’s the big deal there because fried chicken; delicious, watermelon; pretty good, and I love grape soda. My teeth don’t love it but all yummy. Behind that is saying that black people like yummy stuff the way a child likes yummy stuff that they have the tastes of children because they’re not mentally mature and we need to be in charge of them, first through slavery and then after the Civil War through all these other means of control.
Jim Crow, intimidation, the Klan; they’re all horseshit. Even when they have some basis in reality, black people like all people probably do like fried chicken but making a point of it is to justify being in charge of them. Anybody who wants to argue that one race is superior to another is hewing to a creepy agenda, is racist first and just looking for ways to justify racism.
Jacobsen: If I can take a step back I would characterize broadly a lot of this under motivated reasoning. The racist attitudes come first and then the justifications for the allied geologies come second.
Rosner: I agree with you. IQ, especially the early days of IQ at the beginning of the 20th century, it was plugged into this. It was used by racists to argue that the blonder you are the smarter you are basically. It goes Northern Europeans like people from Sweden and then the further south you go until you hit like Italy. Italians are suspect; they’re not smart, they’re mongrels. And then you go further south into Africa but the early IQ tests as we’ve talked about before, were particularly culturally bound. There’s a thing called culture fair which is trying to design IQ tests that don’t rely on cultural knowledge. But the people who designed the first IQ tests, this was not a concept to them, it hadn’t originated yet. The 1910s were super culturally loaded and of course somebody who came to America from Italy or some other country 18 months before was not going to know necessarily which hood ornaments corresponded to which make of car, which was an actual item from some IQ test back then.
It made sense to the person writing the test that you see cars all the time. I’ve seen a million Packards. I’ve seen two million model T’s. Anybody who’s reasonably observant would know which hood ornament goes with which make unless you’re an idiot without really thinking about. What about the person who’s not an idiot but is coming from some country where they don’t have Packards and model T’s? I had a whole bunch of points about racial stereotypes.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 