Breaking the Mold of Stereotypes

¶ … Stereotypes: Positive and Negative Ones

Truthfully, there is no such thing as a positive stereotype. Stereotypes are inherently limiting and circumscribe the expectations and the perceptions of an individual towards another, a group, or towards entire stratifications of social, religious, ethnicities, and other categorizations for people. A more accurate assessment of the concept of a positive stereotype is to denote that some stereotypes are based on assumptions that are supposed to be complimentary in attempts to solicit "stereotype endorsement" (Okeke et al., 2009, p. 366). For instance, regarding the instructor's remarks about Mary, it is supposed to be a compliment that just based on her ethnicity that she should perform well as a dancer. Nonetheless, even these sorts of stereotypes can produce a noxious effect by creating unreasonable expectations. Mary might actually be a fairly poor dancer; she might have avoided taking dance classes all her life because she wanted to eschew the chagrin associated with the fact that she is a Hispanic female who does not have some sort of innate prowess at dancing. Thus, even though some stereotypes are supposed to be complimentary, they are still not quite positive.

It is natural for individuals to stereotype others and individuals for a number of different reasons. Firstly, doing so gives them a way to contextualize and present some basic assumption of understanding of the unknown. It is scary and sometimes difficult to deal with unknown things. Stereotypes helps to eliminate such discomfort and difficulty by providing a framework for assuming things about others that one does not know based on precedents. Doing so is not right, and is not fair to those individuals or groups that one is stereotyping. However, the benefit for stereotyping exists solely with the one forming or conceiving of the stereotype, because it gives him or her a point of reference for attempting to understand things that otherwise may be too complicated or unsettling to understand without some preconceived insight.

People actually learn stereotypes in a variety of ways. Some stereotypes are learned on one's own. A person can have an experience with a certain group of people or perceive a type of codification for people and tend to categorize them based on those circumstances. Additionally, such stereotypes can be formed due to either a negative or positive experience with such a group of people. Again, this is all at the individual level. However, stereotypes are also disseminated via the media (Ramasubramanian, 2010, p 102). This statement particularly applies to television and even films (especially those created for mass media consumption) which rely on numerous stereotypes to reinforce the thinking patterns and habits of people. For example, it is not uncommon to see African-Americans as criminals, or Latinos as janitors in these media productions. Stereotypes are also readily reinforced and propagated via family members and friends.