(Or should I have written, “US and the aliens”?)
The world of a six-year-old is different from an thing with which I grew up. So I was interested during the visit of our grandson to drop in every now and then on the cartoons he was watching on his Kindle. It is, indeed, an alien world. After a little while, however, I began to notice something sadly familiar.
All the ones I saw were American productions. OK: I can live with that. So were the westerns to which I was exposed as a child. What did disturb me, however, was the fact that all the “goodies” had American accents, whereas all the “baddies” had European accents. I guess that if you are hoping to bring up a generation of kids believing that all foreigners are essentially threatening and untrustworthy then that’s a good way to start.
Reflecting on this, however, I began to think of other aspects of the communication of stereotypes. The history of art provides us with an interesting example. The work of Paul Gauguin came to mind, in which the “civilised” wold of Europe is branded as corrupt and fallen from Grace, whereas Polynesia symbolises quite uncritically the possibility of Paradise regained. Are cultural stereotypes somehow inherent in the way we think?