Stereotyping

Stereotyping
PHL 103:   Informal Logic
Instructor: Kurt Mosser
September 12, 2011

Stereotyping is something that I feel we all do to some extent in life. We go about our day to day experiences seeing new people and forming an opinion on them before we truly get to know them. A stereotype is a belief held by you about a certain group of people. This can have long running effects on how we live life, and the person being stereotyped against may have negative effects.
Being an African-American male growing up in the projects of Atlanta by a single mother, I had heard several times from my mother what stereotypes were thrown out about black males. All of them were negative. My first time having an encounter where I was stereotyped was when I was in college at the University of Mississippi. I played football there, and we had all of our personal information in our bio, such as where we grew up, major, things we were interested in. One day in the student union I was checking my mail box when a student who was white asked me if I played football. I explained that I did, and he asked if I was Darius Tate. We went on to exchange email addresses and we would go on to become friends, or at least I thought we became friends. He always seemed to ask me how was school and if I ever needed help to let him know. I thought that he was doing this to be friendly, so I always politely declined his request. One day, I check my email, and I have a forwarded email from a mutual friend of ours that was from Eric. It was titled “Blacks are so dumb”. I thought that I had done enough through my own grades to dispel his myth of all blacks being dumb, but I think that he allowed his stereotype to win out. I asked him why would he feel this way about a group of people, and he told me that throughout his life, he had grown up with black kids that didn’t take school serious, and all they wanted to do was play sports and smoke weed. He generalized an entire race because of a few people...