Stereotypes & Charity

One doesn’t want to sound like the sensitivity police, but certain p.c. commitments are, whatever their origins, expressions of charity and kindness. You don’t have to believe the multicultural orthodoxy that all cultures are equal to think that you shouldn’t speak sweepingly of a whole racial or ethnic group. You don’t want to encourage a way of speaking of groups that leads to the mistreatment of individuals.

The other day I got a fund-raising letter from a conservative enterprise that ended with the writer explaining that twice a year he had to ask for help and in doing so “whine like a gypsy.” Gypsies may be easy for Americans to disparage because few of us know any. All we know is the stereotype. But speaking this way will make it harder for you, or if not you, some of your readers, to engage the Gypsy you meet as a person and not an example of the stereotype. The Golden Rule requires that you don’t do this.