Generalizations and Stereotypes: A Retrospective on the First Half

HOLY CRAP PINK SLIME. IT'S EVERYWHERE.

Okay, so that was totally unrelated, but seriously something you should all check out. It's messed up. And I just saw it on the front page of Yahoo News.

Ahem.

Anyway.

One thing that I've been trying to be more conscious of is not generalizing. That is, trying to recognize that Native peoples come from different tribes and that those tribes can be vastly different from one another, that they don't all share the same opinions or experiences. As I've said in previous posts, some generalizing can be necessary for understanding, but, once you understand, how much should you generalize? Ideally, not at all, but this doesn't seem very possible. We're probably going to do it anyway.

These ideas have really made me consider how most of us do that with any group. Black people are just black people, not South African, Moroccan, Jamaican, Haitian. Feminists think that... Liberals/conservatives believe...

Of course, a lot of this has to do with stereotypes. But there's also another level of generalization, one that's less intentional, less cruel than stereotyping. It's me thinking that Native Americans wear feathers. It's that girl in my Shakespeare class saying that feminists would like Helena from All's Well. It's those people I sat next to in the Bear's Den who believed that all Mormons are polygamists. This type of generalization is more about misunderstanding differences within a group rather than perpetuating false perceptions of a group. While it is less cruel, it can have the same effects as advancing stereotypes.

For example, if I decide that all Native peoples are like Paul Chaat Smith and think that white people who are interested in Native people are stupid, I'm going to be disinclined to support their cause. And if I tell other white people that Natives are just angry and don't want our help, those people are probably going to harbor the same feelings of hostility. Certainly some Natives feel that way, but not all do.

The basic difference, then, between generalization and stereotyping is that stereotyping generally springs from a complete lack of knowledge nor care of a particular peoples, whereas generalization can spring from a little information and some care, but a misunderstanding. I consider myself, up until this point, to have been functioning from a state of generalization. I knew the stereotypes were wrong, but I didn't have enough knowledge to know generalizations from specifics.

Where am I now, then? All I know is that I still have a lot to learn. And maybe I'll never get past generalization. Hopefully, though, I can make it most of the way there.