Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
What if you stereotyped yourself?
The ancient Greek origins of the word "stereotype" tell us that it is a hunting term that means to pin your prey down with a spear. Today it means to define someone's identity for them.
We do not like “being stereotyped;” but we tend to feel justified and productive when we are doing the stereotyping. The Universe is full of stuff and to deal with the volume of information we need to categorize things, people included.
So, is stereotyping unavoidable? Is it necessarily bad? What if you stereotyped yourself?
In our Covalence Conditioning we define over 20 aspects of your identity, the ones beyond human nature and your personality that are colored-in culturally. We reduce who you are to 27 variables. Yet, we know we have not captured the whole you. We know that each one of us is unique. But we also know that a 7-digit phone book can have 544,320 different numbers.
On the other hand, you can survey the members of a culture about these cultural aspects of our identity and see a bell-curve of people’s similarity. From a positive point of view, this commonality is why and how we can get along well and work together quickly. These are the things we can “take for granted” about each other
It results that you can generalize about members of a group. Just do it guardedly. Everyone shares the rich soil of human nature, has their own personality, and has lived different experiences. Even the most typical member of a group “stands out.”
If you apply your generalization too definitively to a member of a group, if you “pin your prey down with a spear,” you are committing an act of violence, you end up carving off and discarding pieces of who they are.
Nonetheless, we meet someone, and we make general conclusions about them, inferring knowledge from other cases we have encountered in person or by reputation. And, often we are correct and often they are proud of how we have described and categorized them.
The very idea of culture implies that groups of people tend towards similarity. When we encounter a person from a culture our generalizations, if we are accurate, correspond to their identification with their group.
Furthermore, we are being very effectively stereotyped all the time. You might say Society is composed of entities that tell members who they are. You might even say that the most power we can have in our lives is to assume a role in defining ourselves. It is a matter of achieving “agency,” the capacity to act independently and to make free choices, by taking charge of who you are.
This tension between belonging and freedom is complex. It’s also always present. In effect, if stereotyping is wrong it is because identity does not dictate all our choices; and if it is right it is because identities are being manipulated in our modern mass-societies and we need to assert ourselves.