False Stereotype

Today in my Martin Luther King class, my professor showed the class a movie about the different responses African Americans chose to retaliate against white power in America during the 1960’s. During the video a white interviewer travels to Cicero, Illinois, an all-white community in northern Illinois, to ask the citizens of the town how they would feel about African Americans moving into their community. Across the board, old and young citizens alike were completely against the idea for fear African Americans were too lazy, dirty, and violent to be able to uphold the standards of their community. Instantly, I thought about the stereotype Professor McKinney addressed in class about Black people primarily being lazy bums who do not like to work. Almost one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, when the stereotype began to circulate around the South, not only did the idea still exist but had also spread across the country.  The concept is mind boggling. What was the primary reason for the existence of the African American in the United States? Labor. A stereotype that has categorized African Americans for centuries is largely unsupported by the historical plight of the race. 

For years Black people cooked, cleaned, provided child care, cultivated crops, and provided other undesirable services to white people. Apparently that was not enough to prove this race just as hardworking as its white counterparts. Black people have been branded with being a group who hate work and love government cheese. Coming from a long line of African American men and women who have shed blood, sweat, and tears, this stereotype has become an itch I can’t seem to scratch. I understand that there are some black people whose main concern may not be to wake up in the morning and engage in some type of mental or physical labor; however, I’m more than sure for every black man with this mentality, there is respectively a white man with the same. It bothers me to think that even after my ancestors spent hours upon hours, days upon days, even years upon years picking hundreds of pounds of cotton in the sun, rain, sleet, and snow, our race has developed into a race cursed with a label of being lazy. Why does this notion have to label blacks as an entire race? How can we move to get rid of a false-stereotype that has defined a group of people for so long?