We’ll Call It Market Research

Stereotyping is BAD. Although very few people reel at the fact that Heineken sponsors Wimbledon and Budweiser sponsors NASCAR, every American knows that only Klansmen and other white males stereotype.

Thus you will understand that, even though this vignette occurred over a month ago, I’m still processing it. I was sitting in the TOC, a large open room where all conversations are public. I hear, “I’ve never been on food stamps – my daddy was white.” The woman who said this must have noted my minor cardiac arrest, but rather than offer asprin, she said to me, “Sir, you probably don’t even know what food stamps are.” “Of course I do.” “How?” she asks. Now everyone knows what food stamps are, and I was slightly taken aback that she would question my cultural awareness. However, saying something like “Some of my best friends were on food stamps,” would not help my case since I have no credibility as a member of an oppressed class, and I have never asked any of my friends if they are. I sarcastically responded, “Oh, I’ve heard stories about them.” She thinks this is hilarious and typical of a white person, so she turns back to the person to whom she was originally talking who has heard our whole conversation and says, “He’s heard stories about food stamps.” I, wanting to know the proper, sensitive way to show that I have knowledge of food stamps in the future ask, “How do you know what food stamps are?” “My mamma’s black.” When you know you can’t win, don’t take the conversation any farther.

Even though stereotyping is BAD, it can be funny when the stereotype fits too well. Chief and I were out doing some last minute maintenance at 8:00 with just the crew of the truck, a sergeant and two privates. We get to chatting and the sergeant volunteers that he was pretty upset when he found out he had been assigned a female gunner (evil, and I don’t approve of that viewpoint), but he says, the first time she came out to the truck she was carrying the fifty caliber machine gun and the extra barrels, no small feat. Before they got on the road the first time, he asked if she had checked her head space and timing, standard machine gun checks, and she snapped back that she knew how to operate her @#%$ machine gun. The sergeant clearly approved of his gunner and her competence. She lit up a cigarette, and since I feel like an old man around most soldiers, I felt compelled to give her a hard time about it as I do for all soldiers under twenty who smoke. I asked her how long she had been smoking, and she said since she was eight. I gave her that “are you kidding me?” look and she said that was nothing – she had started dipping when she was four. Her brothers started her on cigarettes, but her dad started her on Red Man. Is anyone surprised that she came from Okiefenokee, Georgia, population 200, rather than Manhattan?