Sam’s Weekly Water Cooler Musings: On Stereotyping

Everybody knows that black people have rhythm, Italian women can cook, Asian people are good at math, and homosexuals are good at interior design. Right? WRONG. Yet, when you read each one of those things, you knew exactly why I typed it, because of a little thing I like to call pre-judging before knowing, while choosing societal standards over individual information gathering, or as it is commonly known… stereotyping. And that was the topic of our water cooler discussion today.

The big question we had was where these stereotypes came from. I mean, they wouldn’t be stereotypes if someone hadn’t mused so many years ago about how the four Mexicans he met all had multiple jobs. Therefore, he surmised that all Mexicans had multiple jobs. That’s what we realized, that it all had to do with limited worldview. People living in their little corners of the world were hardly ever exposed to people who were different from them, so when they were exposed to them, they thought all people of that group were exactly the same as they were. Which, we now know is wrong. And yet those stereotypes grew until they became pervasive in our society.

Someone else chimed in with this doozy: “Well, if it’s about worldview being small, what’s the excuse now? Our world is so much smaller than it used to be, with the internet, iPads, cell phones, video conferencing, skype, and all that, so what’s stopping us from expanding that worldview and eliminating stereotypes?” We all kind of sat staring at each other for a solid minute, digesting that one. And I guess it comes down to the fact that so many of us think we know how the world works, how people are, and we don’t like to be wrong, so even with the world being smaller, we still blind ourselves to the individuals and focus on the stereotype we know. It’s like our security blanket, so we don’t have to see what’s really going on out there. That’s our own type of pervasive prejudice.

And it’s not just ethnicities and races, either. We stereotype so often about everything and everyone. Computer hackers always live in their mother’s basements. Alcoholics never really want to get help. Teachers are all overpaid (I have absolutely no idea why that one persists, because it is the opposite of true). And the list goes on and on. We included more than 20 different stereotypes that exist, and for every one, at least one of us knew someone who did not in any way fit that stereotype. It really is all about knowing people on an individual level, and not letting any stereotypes steer us away from someone. Then, if we still don’t like them, or find them to fit the stereotype, at least we gave them the benefit of the doubt. Like we wish someone would do for us.

Sam

Sam’s Weekly Water Cooler Musings: The Archive