Week 8

So when I'm asked about whether I believe that stereotyping is a necessary part of representation and character design in our popular creative media, I have to honestly say that it is not. But and this is a big but here, I do think that it is inevitable, and quite possibly unavoidable at this point. When I say this I do not mean that I think that stereotyping is ok, but I can't honestly say that we as a human species no matter what race or ethnicity we are can avoid stereotyping at this point in our evolution of society. I would argue that this tendency to stereotype might not be as prevalent in modern times if we as a people had stopped judging people by things like the color of peoples skin, or the way a particular group of people talked, two-hundred or even a hundred years ago. Of course this is not the case and based on a variety of recent current events it seems that stereotyping is here to stay.

This isn't surprising really, as stereotyping came to us as a survival mechanism, it helped us to avoid danger based on things that we previously had seen or heard about and gave us caution. The real problem that we have with stereotyping is that we started to stereotype based our differences as human beings and because we all adapted this survival mechanism all of us are to blame, whether we have dark skin, light skin, red hair, or any other trait that makes us different from each other. I have accepted that everyone eventually stereotypes someone else, as I know that I am guilty of it, and have had it happen to me on numerous occasions. For example because of my darker complexion, and darker hair, I am often mistaken as someone who is Latino, quite often a Mexican. This has happened all throughout my life and I have for the most part accepted it, and the only time that I get offended is when someone who is actually of latin decent starts speaking Spanish to me without even asking if I speak Spanish and it takes me ten minutes to convince this person that I am in fact not Latino, but German, and a little Native American (Which explains my complexion). So do I think stereotyping is necessary? Not particularly, but is there anything I can do to actually stop stereotyping? Not in this lifetime, till it is no longer a fact of life the only way to deal with stereotyping is to just take it in and prove the stereotyper wrong in as kind and polite a manner as is possible.