Stereotypes In America

Despite the seemingly light-hearted and “harmless” quality of stereotyping in jokes, media, books, and everyday circumstances, stereotyping actually has deeply salient consequences, especially for a culturally diverse, but not equally diverse, society. A stereotype is essentially a widespread belief about a subgroup of people, usually based on an individual’s experience, and caused by irrational thinking. People can stereotype for many reasons: it can provide the brain a cognitive shortcut, it can justify the state of society, it can mollify subconscious fears of the people at stake. However, this stereotyping of individuals is not done just by individuals; it is perpetuated by a huge social structure - it is institutionally embedded by the …show more content…
When my parents immigrated to the United States, for example, they did not do so to steal the white man’s resources, jobs, way of life - and furthermore, I have never met any immigrant of any race who intentionally immigrated to America to steal jobs of hard-working Americans. I doubt the majority of Americans have met such a specific character personally. And yet, when immigration issues arise in policy debates, job-snatching foreigners are one of the most common arguments against opening up immigration policies, and large amount of people are supportive of it wholeheartedly. Where did they get this prejudice? Why would an entire group of people sincerely believe that certain people do not belong in the United States? Why would they need to build this narrative of belonging? This situation is painfully ironic when considering that white Americans themselves were originally immigrants - so who decides which immigrants are good and which are bad? The answer is in the way the people of a culture are raised, how they conceptualize themselves against the “other,” how stereotypes are used as the easiest and most persuasive reasonings even though they lack actual