Stereotypes: Part 2

As I claimed in the first post of this series, stereotypes are so embedded in our everyday vernacular that people use them very liberally in daily conversations and on social media. While I believe that it is hard to explain the so-called “dehumanization” behind a seemingly harmless joke such as “He’s so athletic because he’s African American,” the main problem here is that society condones such generalizations that impose particular identities on individuals, with negative consequences such as the lack of confidence in memory performance for older adults. The prevalence of stereotypes, whether used jokingly or hurtfully, in our daily lives as well as society’s lack of action to stop generalizing are a bit disconcerting. What’s even worse is the existence of pathological stereotypes, which an article in Psychology Today by a professor named Monnica Williams states are “ideas that exist to explain and justify inequalities.”

To me, these types of stereotypes are the worst items that our society can offer because, especially in the case of race, they affect the criminal justice system. The article notes that the people believe in the stereotype that typical drug dealers and “junkies” are African American; this “truth” apparently explains how come African Americans are disproportionately arrested and targeted for drug-related crimes. However, a study by the National Comorbidity Survey Replication showed that African Americans are less likely to consume alcohol and use drugs than white Americans. Of course, the evident discrimination against African Americans is clearly reprehensible, but as Williams continues to state, the biggest problem is that our society is under the impression that our justice system is completely fair and that the disproportionately large representation of African Americans in jail can be explained by their “problems.”

In tandem to that research, a fairly old but still pertinent study by Pennsylvania State University found that what people remember about crime stories is affected by racial stereotypes. The researchers asked over 150 undergraduate students to one out of four stories about a fictitious man. One of the four stories focused on violent crime, and most of the people who received that piece reconstructed a photograph using certain facial features that were strikingly characteristic of African Americans. The catch: the people used in the study seemed to be unaware of their “associations of violent crime with the physical characteristics of African Americans.” This showed the researchers that these racial stereotypes were embedded in the subjects’ unconscious. This reminds me of a post that I wrote in the past about how the malleability of memory can lead to faulty court decisions. Likewise, in this case, the influence of racial stereotypes may influence a victim of some violent attack to choose an innocent African American person over another person of another race.

As with the last post, I think concluding with some solutions to the racial, pathological stereotype would be ideal, but as one researcher in the Penn State study stated, “The idea that this type of stereotyping may occur largely outside of viewers' awareness will make it particularly challenging to curb these kinds of responses." In other words, I think that reversing the effects of the obviously harmful racial stereotype on the criminal justice system and other parts of our society will be extremely difficult. It seems that the only real solution is to increase awareness of the faultiness of such stereotypes and actively work to eliminate them. But in the near future, that unfortunately doesn’t seem like an attainable reality.