Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Staring Problem’

Sooner or later, everyone encounters one of those fat guys that thinks his girth automatically makes him tough or, worse, that his fatness is roughly equivalent to being muscular.

Sadly, there’s wide pandemic of this type of wannabe-tough-guy asshole in the urban Latino and black communities, a problem I attribute largely to the popularity of football, which rewards a few linebackers–with little more ability than that of clogging up space–with the largely undeserved labels of “tough” and “athletic.”

I usually ride back here.

It’s pretty easy to know when you’re dealing with one of these idiots. For one, they’re enormous. They waddle around, often in some sort of sports gear, trying hard to look hard. And, they’re one of the more likely candidates to diagnose your staring problem. If he’s assumed any position of authority–however minor–rest assured that he fully, and regularly, trips on his power. Think bouncers, the occasional bus driver, and–of course–tow-truck operators.

There’s a TV show that relies almost entirely on these characters for its poorly staged theatrics—TruTV’s Operation Repo. The show, which features a group of (mostly Latino) male and female “tough guys” doing sham repossessions, is an unsettling reminder of why the United States and Mexico are numbers one and two—respectively—on the list of the world’s fattest countries.

It used to be that we consistently portrayed the fat guy as inferior to the fit guy.(And, often, as the bad guy.) The Blutos of the world routinely got their asses kicked by the slimmer, buffer Popeyes.

But nowadays, we celebrate the Blutos.

Nobody likes being stared at. But ethnic people seem to have a special aversion to it. The more ethnic, the more they don’t like it. I can’t count the number of times–in my younger years–I asked, was asked, or witnessed the asking of whether someone (or I) had a “staring problem.” The staring usually ended right there. If you ever wanted to intentionally provoke a beef with an ethnic person, all you had to do was mad dog them for a little while.¹

¹Mad Dog (verb) To stare fixedly at someone in a hostile manner. Generally used to convey anger or disdain, can be a signal that a fight is about to happen.

[from Urban Dictionary]

So when I heard the story of “racist” malfunctioning in the new HP Deluxe Webcam, I immediately knew what was going on.

Hewlett Packard’s new camera includes innovative face-tracking technology, which follows a user’s face – even if it moves out of frame, or zooms in when the user is farther away.

This technology wasn’t working for one African-American consumer – the webcam didn’t move at all for him. But for his white co-worker, who was right next to him at the time, the face-tracking feature worked perfectly.

And so the man…had a message for one of the largest technology companies in the world: “Hewlett Packard computers are racist,” he says.

[Excerpted from theGrio.com]

This, I’m afraid, is no glitch. But it’s also not clear-cut racism. The device is just making a calculated assessment of the circumstances at hand.

Put yourself in its shoes.

Here you are, a nice deluxe-webcam from Palo Alto, California and, all of a sudden, you got a black dude in your face. The guy may look and sound friendly, but you know that even the friendliest ethnic people are liable to get pissed if you look at them too long, never mind follow them around the room with your “tracking lens.”

So, you play it cool, disregard your programming, and look away–while keeping an eye on him from the corner of your lens.

That’s not racist.