Sexual Orientation Stereotypes(2)

While doing research on Caucasian Racial Stereotypes I came across this story by Richard Dyer inside his book "White". It explains the kinship he shares with a black boy who comes into his class when he was in nursery school.

"I seem from a very early age to have had a feeling for non-white people, a feeling something like kinship; yet there were moments when, for some reason or other, I suddenly realized that I really was not kin, and it was thus that I really realized I was white. I was brought up in a suburb of London, in a period (the late 1940s and early 1950s) in which there were relatively few non-white people in Britain. I went to a nursery school. On day a black boy came to class and was teased unmercifully by the other children. I, however, took his side. I knew that I was regarded as a funny little boy, chiefly because I preferred playing with dolls and flowers to guns and cars. Perhaps I felt an affinity between myself and another boy who was funny because, albeit for a different reason, he too was not like the other boys." (Dyer: 1997: 5)

Richard Dyer also talks about his kinship to a Jewish boy named Danny Marker.

"I used to visit him and his family in Golders Green, a Jewish neighborhood of London. I knew by then that I was a homosexual and I envied Danny and his family- they too were an oppressed minority, whom, like queers, you could not always spot; but, unlike us, they had this wonderful, warm community and culture and the wrongfulness of their oppression was socially recognized." (ibid)

After reading Richard Dyer's book "White", I have gained a wealth of knowledge on the white culture and I have the utmost respect for him. Not only because of his bravery in openly admitting his sexual orientation, but also sharing his point of view of whiteness.

"The point of looking at whiteness is to dislodge it from its centrality and authority, not to reinstate it (and much less, to make a show of reinstating it, when, like male power, it doesn't actually need reinstating)." (Dyer: 1997: 10)