Fake People

I used to have a serious problem. Now it's not so bad, but it still comes up from time to time. For the longest time I didn't catagorize myself with the rest of humanity. It's not that I didn't think I was human, not consciously anyway. It was more a matter of seeing myself as entirely different from all others, in a bad way, on a much lower level.
I even tried to explain it to my best friend. I told her about how I never felt like a real person. That's how I worded it, and I explained why I didn't see myself as important at all.
Anyway, enough about that. That personal issue is only important in how I've found a way to relate it to a much a larger social situation.
I live in a profoundly crappy area. It's all full of homeless people and not at all affluent. The really frustrating aspect of living here is that despite the diversity and the up front need to face people who are different from me, I am no more tolerant of others. In fact, I've found racist, sexist, agist, classist, and any other biased tendencies are magnified. This I associate with the fact that I see every stereotype I know rendered in human form and I deal with them every day, acting just as expected.
I think that this is because of stereotypical expectation itself rather than a means of proving the accuracy of those stereotypes.
By example, I have such expectations as predicting all men to be thoughtless, self centered, and unattentive. I see them constantly proving that they are. I think they do it largely because many like me expect it, so they know no other behavior. The sdame goes for expecting certain groups of women, whether old and old-fashioned or young and spoiled, to be picky and haughty.
The worst, though, is the racially based expectation. I think it's a huge social problem that permeates a lot of the country.
I think white Americans hold the paradigm that they are the normal ones and the real people, and thus all others around them are variations on their base. This means noone of any other race is truly a real person, but more a parody of a person, and has to have a parody identity.
I think that this belief puts pressure on an average black man, telling him he's not a normal man because he's not a white man, so he can't be a straight character. He has to be some wierd comical character, so his identity becomes like a joke. In some way he must be some kind of clown.
I see examples in the young male students I know. They are perfectly capable of behaving quietly and sensibly, but instead they are loud, obnoxious, and oversexed, as though that defines who they are, because they absolutley have to be that way. And it relieves conceited people like me from having to take them seriously, because they appear to constantly act idiotic.
It's not only annoying to me, but it's wrong. I don't see why every black man must be funny to me, so be smushed to the side of "normal" onto some abnormal and not quite real personality.
That's not really a complete thought, it's just an impulse, and I sure hope it doesn't look racist, because it's not.