Arnav Agarwal
Friday, June 29th, 5:20pm, Toronto. Public transit, back-seat. Rosa Parks might disagree, but sitting at the back of the bus carries its own sense of adventure. A young student belonging to an ethnic minority group walks onto the bus, dropping his coins into the machine at the front and picking up a transfer from the bus-driver. He walks to the back of the bus, a small grin on his face and skateboard in hand. As he finds a seat at the back, he peers out the window, and receives a smile from his friend on the exterior of the bus. Pulling open the window with a slight tug, he stretches his arm and quickly throws something out the window. A breeze propels his small paper ball floats under the bus.
Outside, the boy’s friend—also an ethnic minority—bends underneath the bus to retrieve the seemingly discarded paper. He picks himself up, dusting off his pants before casually walking to the front of the bus, opens the ball, and shows a transfer ticket to the bus-driver before making his way to his friend. One transfer allowed three young people to board the bus, as they repeated the act twice more times within a span of three minutes. I was just as intrigued by the cleverness of this plan as I was shocked by how far people can go to save $3.25.
As I shared this experience with one of my friends, he shook his head in disapproval. “Why are you even surprised?” he asked. “That’s their way. What do you expect?” While I couldn’t disagree more with his prejudice, he raised an important question: what do we expect? In a multicultural hub, marked by its dynamic diversity, we have engineered a society that has a mindset of its own. Some may see this as a good thing—conforming to a unified social perspective. They couldn’t be further from the truth.
When we examine “at-risk” groups in educational institutions, minority ethnicities are often the highest on the list. Similar trends can be found in crime rates across the globe. A prime example of this is an article in the UK’s Daily Mail, which stated that authorities hold the black population responsible for both the majority of crimes committed and for being twice as likely to be victims of crime, despite only 12 percent of London’s 7.5 million people being black in ethnicity. The article, published in 2010 and titled “black men ‘to blame for most violent crime’…but they’re also the victims”, mentioned 67% of those caught for gun crimes in 2009-2010 in London were black, and the police held black men responsible for two-thirds of shootings and more than half the robberies and street crimes in London, according to figures released by Scotland Yard. A critical eye was placed on black women as well, with 52% of robberies, 45% of knife crimes, and 58% of gun crimes that police had an involvement with being placed on them.[1]
Is there something different about these ethnicities? Or are we looking for an answer that isn’t even out there? We often attribute qualities to certain groups, whether ethnic in nature or otherwise. There are numerous theories as to what gives rise to these stereotypes. These ethnic minority groups are no different. Several have come to take on a stereotype of violence, substance abuse, low academic performance, and uncivil activity. There are several theories—among which are the subculture of violence theory, the social control theory, and the macro-structural opportunity theory—which strive to find a definitive explanation for this behaviour. These ethnic groups have essentially come to take on an intricate identity in the public eye, which can be captured by one word: danger.
But this is not about the trends themselves, but rather what gives rise to it. The answer to that is clear: the answer lies in the question itself. Stereotypes give rise to stereotypical behaviour. It may seem paradoxical; after all, doesn’t consistent human behaviour produce stereotypes? What is truly paradoxical, however, is how oblivious we are to the environment we create through stereotyping, which gives rise to these behavioural trends. A well-known case in psychology involved parents who deceived their child into believing they were female for over fourteen years of their life, until the child finally identified as being male in gender at the age of fourteen.[2] How is society any different? By making a baseless perspective so commonplace in the social framework, we have almost laid out an expectation of “danger.” If an ethnic group is raised in an environment where it is marginalized by the views of the very society that nurtures it, what more are we to expect? It’s ironic that psychology is rooted in an ongoing debate regarding nature versus nurture. While it is clear that human behaviour isn’t shaped solely by the nature of an individual, we nurture our people in a hostile environment of negative expectations.
Does this excuse the high rates of violence, the low rates of academic performance, or the offender’s crime on the public transit? Of course not. But it’s hard to expect a seed to flourish into a flower when the soil itself is arid and lacking.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1290047/Metropolitan-Police-crime-statistics-reveal-violent-criminals-black--victims.html
[2] http://people.uncw.edu/bruce/psy%20265/pdfs/inter%201.pdf
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