Many may wonder, “What exactly is the problem with stereotypes?”
To some, stereotypes are jokes, comical expressions to say at parties to break the ice. To some, they’re what you say about a group of people when you don’t actually know anything about them but want to sound knowledgeable.
In short, to many people they’re harmless. But to others, stereotypes are nothing to play with. To many, like myself and others, stereotypes have the power to define a person’s existence.
In a class I had recently, a large section of the day’s lecture dealt with the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. Brick by brick, we pieced together how stereotypes, confirmed by pseudoscience and sometimes outright lies, led to the belief that anyone non-white and mentally ill was inferior.
Because they were inferior, they were not to produce any more inferior beings. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, thousands upon thousands of Americans were forcibly, unjustly sterilized by various eugenics commissions across the country.
The problem with stereotypes is that they have the power to drive the narrative and belief system about a group of people.
This then drives individual treatment and, eventually, institutional treatment. Stereotypes are how racism, sexism, classism, islamophobia, transphobia and all the other isms and phobias we have in our lexicon today are started, continued and institutionalized.
Through stereotypes we saw the rise of Adolf Hitler and one of the worst genocides of a people in human history. More recently in North Carolina, through stereotypes we’ve seen House Bill 2, which has stripped North Carolina’s LGBT population of their civil rights.
HB2 wasn’t enacted because the LGBT community was going in bathrooms and sexually assaulting children. It was crafted because of a stereotype that anyone that doesn’t conform to heteronormativity is probably a vile, repugnant child molester.
