After You My Dear Alphonse Response

Author's Note: I wrote this to respond on the story, "After You My Dear Alphonse," by Shirley Jackson. I will talk about how reverse racism and stereotyping is in Pewaukee, and the world. Also I will talk about the author's message and what she was trying to teach us.

Shirley Jackson was trying to teach us a lesson about how you shouldn’t believe all the stereotypes you hear about people and places and how to treat different people you would any other person. When Johnny’s mom was asking Boyd so many questions, and really seeming to believe the stereotypes, Boyd was acting all suspicious and seemed to be questioning why she was acting so weird and asking such bizarre questions. This story seemed like it was to teach us how mean and occasionally naive you can sound by believing these stereotypes and expecting them to be true and accurate about everyone.

I think this story compares to Pewaukee because we also believe many stereotypes about people who are in different schools and cities than us. For example, a stereotype about people is Waukesha is, poor or gang related. Usually they are associated as bad news and trouble. Also we associate Milwaukee with gangs, shootings, robberies and people who belong in jail. But I have met people from both places and not everyone from there is the way we stereotype them. This also happens all over the world with different countries and ethnicities. We can all learn from Shirley Jackson’s story, we can learn not to believe everything we hear and not everyone is the same in these places so we should get to know the person without making assumptions based on how they look, their ethnicity and where they’re from.