I took Sociology 1 in last year's fall quarter, I have learned something very important, and that was about stereotypes. We, human beings, tend to judge or categorize people by their ethnicities or skin colors. I have a personal experience of being stereotyped by other people. I am an Asian who is not good at math or sciences. I get quite uncomfortable when people ask me if I'm a math major or economics major because I am a person with black hair, brown eyes and yellow skin. Because of my outlook, I am being labeled as someone that I'm not. Americans tend to view Asians as intelligent diligent people. I must admit there are many hardworking Asians, but not only Asians, there are numerous people from different ethnicities who are hardworking too.
As a child, my mother always taught me never to judge others. Judging an individual by his/her skin color or ethnic group is very wrong, extremely demeaning and not fair for the person. For example, after 911, Americans had and still have a phobia towards Middle=Eastern people and Muslims because the terrorists belonged these two categories. From then onwards, many Middle-Eastern people and Islam followers were discriminated. People don't realize that stereotyping hurts the person. Stereotyping does not view a person as an individual but as a member of a certain category. Therefore, the person who is being judged on due to his/her outlook is not respected. If we could stop and prevent stereotyping from happening in the future, everybody would be equal, the world would be a better place.
Like many other people out there, I view stereotypes as a way to judge people you don't know despite the fact that no one really truly knows a person inside out. Stereotypes even seems like a justified way of racism to me. I know we all try to not categorize people based on their looks and ethnicity but it's inevitable that we all do it intentionally or not. In a way, i came to believe that we tend to stereotype people and at the same time practice racism because we've seen our older generation do it. For example, i know my parents don't mean harm when they generalize people but it does influence the way some of my siblings think. It's extremely hard to eliminate all stereotypes and racism because we can't undo the influence that our parents, grandparents and the people before them did. I wish there was a way to rid it all but it seems very impossible.
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