{"id":10520,"date":"2015-01-23T09:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T14:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=10520"},"modified":"2017-07-09T01:28:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T06:28:56","slug":"stereotyping-scots-as-cheap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/01\/23\/stereotyping-scots-as-cheap\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheap Scots and Disappearing Stereotypes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

A website called\u00a0Found in Mom’s Basement<\/a> posted this vintage toilet paper ad that plays on the stereotype that Scottish people are\u00a0cheap.\u00a0From the post:<\/p>\n

Although the stereotype of the cheap Scotsman isn’t as widely known in the U.S. today, going back a few decades it was an ethnic stereotype that was used freely, often making the Scots the butt of jokes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"6a00d83451ccbc69e20105370a813a970b-400wi\"<\/p>\n

The post has links to several examples, such as the\u00a0Studebaker Scotsman<\/a>, a low-cost, minimal-options car.\u00a0As a commenter to that post pointed out, Safeway\u2019s store brand cigarettes, advertised as being inexpensive, was \u201cScotch Buy<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0For a more recent\u00a0example, we have\u00a0McFrugal<\/a>, a hardware site (now down):<\/p>\n

\"picture-1\"<\/p>\n

A reader, Julia, noted that Scotch tape was named\u00a0that because<\/a>:<\/p>\n

it originally had adhesive only on the edges of the tape. \u00a0[An early user]\u00a0told a 3M salesman to go back to his “Scotch bosses” (presumably too cheap to put adhesive all over the tape) and make it stickier.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Scots-are-cheap stereotype\u00a0is a great example of\u00a0how ethnic stereotypes can lose their power. Maybe I’m just oblivious, but until a few\u00a0years ago, I’d never heard of the stereotype that Scots were cheap. Without that context, the associations the ads are attempting to make would be meaningless to me — I would have just thought it was odd that McFrugal had a guy with bagpipes, but not understood that it might have any meaning. When I asked students in my race class about this, only a couple had ever heard this stereotype.<\/p>\n

Obviously,\u00a0though, it used to be a very common, widely-recognized notion. Much like the Irish and other European ethnic groups, as Scots became part of the larger “White” racial category, ethnic distinctiveness and stereotypes have become less prominent.<\/p>\n

Originally posted in 2009.<\/em><\/p>\nGwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. A website called\u00a0Found in Mom’s Basement posted this vintage toilet paper ad that plays on the stereotype that Scottish people are\u00a0cheap.\u00a0From the post: Although the stereotype of the cheap Scotsman isn’t as widely known in the U.S. today, going back a few decades it was an ethnic stereotype that was used freely, often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":65692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[253,1811,285,1757,23705],"class_list":["post-10520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-nation-britainthe-u-k","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-vintage-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/01\/29.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10520"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70416,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10520\/revisions\/70416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}