The United States is obsessed with classifying people according to race and ethnicity. By the age of four most children have developed “race awareness;” then, when they go to school, they are asked to check the appropriate box: “Hispanic,” “Asian,” “Black,” “White,”, etc. All people must fit in one group or another, and once they think of themselves as members of one box, they find it easy to stereotype the members of the other boxes.

Each of these groups is loaded with stereotypes: For some, Hispanics have large families and are into gangs; for others, whites are power hungry racists interested in kinky sex; while for others, all blacks are criminals and/or on welfare; and still for others, Asians are cold, calculating mathematicians. These are only a few of the stereotypes; check your own mind for more. When a friend says the word “Asian,” what comes into your head? The media, especially film, TV, the other visual arts, and literature, popularize these stereotypes, and often in very subtle ways.

It is important to remember that the above descriptions are mental creations - made up by groups of people. Why they develop and how they are popularized are very complex issues. For example, the Sambo stereotype has an historical basis. It originated in the slave-holding South. It isn’t found in Shakespeare and it isn’t found in South America even though slavery was practiced in the English and Spanish colonies at the same time as it was in the South.

Stereotypes are constructed for a purpose; they have a function in society; otherwise they would not last. It is often argued that the Sambo stereotype functioned to justify Southern slave-holding. For white Southerners raised on the phrase, “all men are created equal,” keeping slaves in a democratic country would cause serious guilt, unless you believe that slaves are children, not “men.” After all, children need to be cared for by adults.

The author Toni Morrison makes this same point. She, too, believes that stereotypes have a function. She points out in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, that in Hemingway novels, male nurses are almost always black. She sees them as “Tontos.” Tonto is the loyal Indian friend and faithful companion of the Lone Ranger, the white hero of the very popular radio and TV series. He is the sidekick that helps, but never threatens the image of the white, “lone,” ranger - the independent, successful, law-upholding hero. To Morrison, the presence of blacks in roles such as male nurses, functions to teach us that blacks are useful, convenient, and sometimes welcome. They operate in a service capacity and, when no longer needed, they are expendable. On the other hand, the lone ranger is not expendable; he is absolutely essential to the American way of life.

We all carry racial and ethnic descriptions in our minds. Just seeing a black, brown, or red body activates stereotypes. They influence how we think, how we treat people, how we vote, and how we judge people in courts of law. Stereotypes are the simple-minded generalizations we carry around. Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man goes so far as to say that the black man is “invisible.” People outside the “black” box don’t even see him, they just see the stereotype. Stereotypes are also harmful; by preventing us from seeing what each other is really like, they destroy social life and community.

What can we do to eliminate the stereotypes we carry in our heads? First, we must be able to see them - to see them as stereotypes rather than as reality. That is one reason that the art of Michael Ray Charles is important. He wants us to see black stereotypes, to have fun with them, but also to recognize them for the distortion of reality they are. In so doing, he promotes the second thing we can do, and that is to go beyond the stereotype so that we can see the unique individual for what s/he is. Stereotypes are gross generalizations applied to unbelievably large groups of people. There are over thirty million blacks in the United States. Imagine lumping them together as though one description fits all!

But what has all of the above to do with aesthetics? There is an important connection between the stereotypes that are found in the art of Michael Ray Charles (and other artists) and aesthetic theory and analysis. Art is most often judged using four aesthetic criteria: realism, formalism, expressionism, and instrumentalism. In many art works more than one of these criteria (perhaps others) are used to make judgments. Those artists that are emphasizing stereotypes in their art are no doubt concerned with realism; however, they are predominantly instrumentalists; they want to change people’s minds and behavior. They want to force the viewer to talk about racial and ethnic descriptions, to recognize stereotypes, to analyze them, and to go beyond them. They want political change.