Classify Others As You Would Onto You Blog #3 Frank DiMaria

I was thinking a lot about the concept of understanding stereotypes and discrimination through a psychological lens. We covered theories in class, which try and explain the origins of each said actions, and define personality traits, which may or may not add up to the sum of a person who believes in stereotypes and discriminates. What I thought about in class was, how can some theorist really score a persons level of stereotypical and discriminatory tendencies. Now, I am no psychologist by any means nor do I profess to be, but when I hear about these psychologists doing experiments to measure something like, “how much a person believes in stereotypes,” or,” how racist a persons is,” I cant hardly believe that the test or scores are in any way accurate. First of all, we are taught at a young age the notion of, “political correctness.” So, even if a person feels a certain way, there is a huge chance that, within a public setting or experimentation setting, for that said individual, not to want to preserve personal face value of an upstanding citizen whom is colorblind, so to speak. I am not commenting on the unjustness of people (in a general sense), and I do believe that people are “color blind” sometimes, but the fact of the matter remains; there is always a certain bias to be assumed when taking into account testing someone regarding attributes. Then I thought about our textbook, which is pretty good at laying out ideas about ethnicity and race. But, I also thought about the last chart in the book for chapter three (also the last one on the slide show). Basically, the chart was figuring out a person’s bias based on personality traits. Well this is all well and good, but then I thought to myself, by classifying people in categories in which that said category would yield the most, for instance, stereotyping tendencies, isn’t that in itself creating another stereotype? For instance, if I were to interpret the chart literally, and only thought in a deductive sense, I would identify someone with controlling habits as more prone to display and believe in stereotypes. Therefore, all with a tendency of controlling attributes discriminates and believes in stereotypes. Ok, I am being a little extreme, but here’s the point; the way to help combat the ideas of stereotypes and resist discriminatory actions is not by categorizing people most likely to display the said injustices. The way to start and eliminate problems such as discrimination and stereotyping is through addressing the thought process of a person. I don’t think there is any way to completely eliminate ignorant thinking or judgmental tendencies (these are natural and used as primitive defense mechanisms), but if we as “scholars” truly want to make a difference in the world, we need to be the start of a conversation addressing how people think. We need to be open to others ideas, and if a person is using stereotypes to make opinions or discrimination, we can’t say, “that person is just a jerk.” We have to hear them out, and then get to the root, as humbly as we can, of the problem in the thinking process. Most of what people believe, which isn’t truth, is only because they haven’t been proposed with another way of thinking of things. People form beliefs over a period of time, so, let us not classify others, but rather learn about others and see their side first before becoming what we profess to stand up against.