Stereotype

In this nation that we call a civilization, stereotyping is everywhere. Many people judge a person by his or her races, appearances, jobs, interests, heritages, in stead of getting to know or trying to understand that person at the first place. It’s basically an action of grouping people into categories. It leads to comparisons between one to the others, who have the same fundamental classes.             There are many types of stereotype problems. Some of them are very serious, they could be blinding and offensive; some are not as harmful as they may look, but deep down inside, they still carry the potentials for damages. An obvious common example of stereotype was discussed in the article “Who is a Whiz kid?” The author was a Jewish foster father of an Asian-American boy, his son was adopted from Korea since he was 5-moth-old. Because of his son’s Asian heritage, the author had expected the complements of friends and neighbors, about what a mathematic genius he would became. But to his surprise was people had started talking about his academic success before he could even sit up. He disapproved the ideas or attempts to dictate his son’s interests or his abilities based on race or place of birth, and shown strong resistance of stereotype. On top of that, he had pointed that stereotype was another aspect of racism. It is discriminative, also it hurts the people that happened to be inside the group but didn’t qualify the expectations of others. Most important of all, it could leave out the true talent behind a person. He said: “ Such sweeping descriptive, be they negative or positive, deny the one thing most precious to all peoples--individuality.” And I couldn’t have agreed more. There is another article: “Time to Look and Listen”, it discussed the same issue, only this one was worst. An Arabic girl has being isolated by her friends simply because everyone thought all Arabic was terrorists. This was another example of stereotype, but a much more dangerous. The girl’s feeling was hurt; the crucial judgment had given her deep emotional damages. She was alone and confused. Several years later, she had being able to managed to get over her nightmare, but the scar that was cut deep inside her heart could never healed.            I have experiences of stereotypes too, living in this proud and rich country as an immigrant, those are the thing that you can see almost everyday. Being considered as a mathematic smart kid was the most usual one, and it’s similar to the first case that I had mentioned. I understand the fact that I am good at calculus, is not the reason why people think I am smart. It’s my skin color is. And there is something only the heart of Asian people know, most of us are not born with the mathematical talent, we are good because we work hard. Math in schools of Asia is a lot tougher, and many other subject too, so we have a head start. Our hard work is our talent, and we don’t get reward for nothing, but I doubt many people could see that.             Even if we want to eliminate stereotype, we can’t, it doesn’t seem to be very possible in this country. With different kinds of immigrants coming in, world politics messing around, I can tell our future is not bright. But it doesn’t hurt to hope. If we do the right thing, at lease we can set a good example for the younger brothers and sisters, or for the next generation. Try to get to know a person by knowing, not by dividing him or her into the categories. That should be a good start.