(Incidentally - I don't know what this pic means...okay, I'm lying I do...but some of the pics could have been drawn better)
This won't be a long post, I'm trying to jumble too many things together and it's too easy to get complicated. For the record, most of my hits come from people looking for info on ambiguous relationships - I wrote about it when I first started this blog....kinda interesting - I may expound on that one later....but I digress....
Here's my question to you - do stereotypes and prejudices fit in the same category? ASL made the following comment on my last post -
"there are reasons why there are stereotypes... stereotypes exist on the basis of both the stereotyping party and the stereotyped party."
And I replied that I'd have to think about it for a while. Here's what I came up with - in an ideal world there would be no stereotypes, prejudice or discrimination. Obviously, we don't live in a perfect world. So, I'm going to say that prejudice is a natural occurence based on our environment - whether it's race, class, or culture. However, when we allow our prejudice to turn into discrimination that's when we have a problem.
But where does stereotyping fall in this whole setup? Is it wrong, or like prejudice a natural occurence based on experience, media, etc...any thoughts???
2 comments:
This is an exercise in vernacular-splitting, but to me "stereotypes" and "prejudices" are not synonomous terms. Particular groups of people have stereotypes associated with them - for better or worse. As part of human nature we categorize people and continually make judgments. When we meet a particular type of person we automatically make presumptions, true or false. Stereotypes become prejudices when, 1) we treat people differently because of a stereotypical presumption (e.g. all law students are douche bags), and/or 2) upon discovering that an individual does not "fit" a particular stereotype, we still treat them in a pejorative way. Stereotypes are rebuttable presumptions about people. When the presumption isn't rebuttable in a persons mind, i.e. they will never treat a [pick cognizable group] person differently regardless of that individuals character, prejudices exist. There are few, if any, people that can inextricably seperate stereotypes and prejudices - it requires complete intellectual compartmentalization. Was that confusing enough? Bottom line: we all buy into stereotypes and are all a little prejudice by nature.
Metheus gets it pretty right - I think the human brain is just designed to categorize things and will try to fit things into categories so it knows how to react to things. This used to be "large animal with sharp teeth approaching - run now!" but has turned into "person with dark skin approaching - they might have a gun!" Stereotypes can turn into prejudices. I like the idea that we can overcome our stereotypes while someone with prejudice cannot. But what's the solution?
Post a Comment