Yostivanich

An idea that has been dis­cussed on and off again in my his­tory class (His­tory of Women in Amer­ica) is what would hap­pen if some how every liv­ing per­son on the face of the earth did not have any stereo­types about any other per­son. No racial, no reli­gious, no gen­der and sex­ual, no stereo­types of any kind. Would the stereo­types reap­pear, would a dif­fer­ent set of stereo­types come into play, or would stereo­types no longer exist. It is an inter­est­ing ques­tion and the focus of tonight’s post.

I per­son­ally feel that no mat­ter what is taught by the gov­ern­ment in schools or by par­ents in the house­hold, that stereo­types will ever dis­ap­pear. Here is why, stereo­types are cre­ated not just by what you explic­itly learn, but also through what you implic­itly learn. So, by the same mea­sure that you learn that every­one is and should treated equally, you also see peo­ple all the time who are treated dif­fer­ently than how you treat peo­ple who are in your same social class, for exam­ple, in life. This is just one sim­ple exam­ple that shows how even a lib­eral edu­cated per­son has stereo­types in their per­son and will pos­si­bly never get rid of them.

How­ever, we are dis­cussing a sit­u­a­tion (which is far from the realm of pos­si­ble, though not that it isn’t desir­able) where all stereo­types have been elim­i­nated from society’s and humankind’s col­lec­tive mind. First off let us rec­og­nize stereo­types for what they are. Stereo­types are not nor­mally based on present con­di­tions although there do exist stereo­types that are rel­a­tively new. Most stereo­types are from society’s past, they are result of one social group sup­press­ing another social group. For this sim­ple fact, I think that stereo­types stand a chance of being elim­i­nated. The crux of the prob­lem resides in the first gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren to grow up in our fic­tional world. In a world with­out stereo­types, the ques­tion is, would the chil­dren cre­ate their own new stereo­types based on present con­di­tions and actions? If they do not, you will quite pos­si­bly have a large por­tion of peo­ple trans­fer­ring jobs and posi­tions in soci­ety that are more tra­di­tion­ally (in our soci­ety) asso­ci­ated with another social group. For instance will more women become lead­ers in indus­try, will more whites pre­form lower income posi­tions and will more minori­ties go off to col­lege and become managers?

There are a lot of assump­tions in this the­ory, this is the major flaw with it. Which is why I don’t know for cer­tain which would hap­pen. It could eas­ily be argued that because the soci­ety is going to look the same as our soci­ety, the stereo­types will come back into play, because every facet of soci­ety is divided up into already pre-existing social groups. These social groups could and in all likely hood will cause stereo­types to come back into play into soci­ety. Here is why, the peo­ple you are most com­fort­able with are peo­ple who you work with, live with, and social­ize with. When those peo­ple stay the same, but the stereo­types of other social groups is non-existent, why wouldn’t the stereo­types come right back into play. Every­day, you see an older white male is in charge of most com­pa­nies, major­ity of day-laborers are His­panic at the very least and some­times though not always ille­gal immi­grants, recep­tion­ists are gen­er­ally female, a vast major­ity of peo­ple in prison are there based on drugs and are also African-American, many sci­en­tists and researchers you would hear about are Chi­nese or Asian, the call-center that you call for cus­tomer ser­vice con­sis­tently con­sti­tutes of Indi­ans. It isn’t just that these state­ments and obser­va­tions are stereo­types, but that they are true in our mod­ern lib­eral demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety. The ques­tion now becomes rather than will the social struc­ture change, to can it change? Since there are still mech­a­nisms in place that cause social groups to not be able to change their posi­tion in soci­ety, such as sheer eco­nom­ics of gain­ing a col­lege degree to be able work at a dif­fer­ent job other than man­ual labor or fast food.

I have been debat­ing this ques­tion inter­nally for a week or so and can not come to an effec­tive con­clu­sion on the ques­tion of could stereo­types dis­ap­pear from soci­ety. Per­son­ally, when I started writ­ing this post, I was of the opin­ion that they could dis­ap­pear. I sat on the post for another week or so and changed my mind almost every day. After a week or so of think­ing and debat­ing, I feel that stereo­types will in all likely hood not dis­ap­pear. They will be replaced by a dif­fer­ent set of stereo­types that instead of being based upon his­tor­i­cal con­text, will be found in the cur­rent cul­ture and soci­ety of our imag­i­nary world. Also the stereo­types will suf­fer just as hard of a time dis­ap­pear­ing in this new soci­ety as in our present soci­ety because there are other rea­sons beyond just stereo­types that limit a social groups abil­ity as a whole to change the sta­tus of their cur­rent con­di­tions. Stereo­types do play a large role in the sup­pres­sion of social groups and I do feel that with stereo­types gone, social groups will have a much bet­ter oppor­tu­nity to be able to change their posi­tion in soci­ety. Stereo­types are some­thing that I wish per­son­ally did not exist but I feel will always exist in soci­ety, no mat­ter how much soci­ety wishes to get rid of them.