As Americans we have a subconscious ability to place people into groups by the way someone looks, how they talk, their gender preferences, and what they believe. It is common because it is how we interact as a society. It is how we interact with each other, and we have it in our heads that we can determine who a person is in a matter of seconds. It is our way as human beings to justify the way we want to treat someone because it gets rid of the unknowns.
We don't like the unknown in society and our media. We need to know and get everything right away. Stereo Types is a way for us to quickly categorize people we may not understand and their actions so that we can justify the way society and us as people treat them. Women are to sensitive, is just one way of saying that "I don't want to watch what I say in front of them, or they are to hard to understand."
If we look beyond that we can see that everyone has attributes that are of all stereo types. That just because your a women doesn't mean your sensitive, and just because your a man doesn't mean that you cant share your feelings. Each person is different and has different attributes and tendencies and shouldn't be categorized.
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I agree with you 100 percent. We as Americans are afraid of the unknown. I liked in the clip of the office how Michael tries to teach this concept to all the people in the office and it turns out to be a disaster like always, but he did make a good point of how stereotypes work and how us as a people label them on all kinds of different groups and races, but its not always a good thing. People are different and it should be for us to find that out and get to know them instead of someone, who knows where, telling us how this sort of people are.
ReplyDeleteThis is great. You are really addressing some of the problems that stereotypes present in our society, but more importantly, why we use them. I don't think that categorizing individuals is necessarily a bad thing, it's when we assume that a person is a particular way by virtue of the groups they belong to. There's nothing wrong with saying, "that kid is a basketball player" or "that woman is overweight"...these are just statements of fact. The problems come when we assume that we know anything/everything about those people just because of a few attributes they may have.
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