English Composition 101.0816
October 31, 2013
Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgment

The author’s essay “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments” by Robert Heilbroner discusses about the many faces of stereotyping. Heilbroner reminds us that stereotyping affects many areas of our lives from how we view the world as a whole to how we view each individually. According to Heilbroner there is nothing positive/good about stereotyping. The author states that it makes people lazy thinkers and that it harms both the people we are stereotyping and ourselves. The author gives us three ways we can stop stereotyping people. My grandmother believed that all hispanic people are illiterate, dark colored and dangerous. I didn’t understand why she believed this; she didn’t even meet many hispanic people. I have never heard my grandmother say anything positive about hispanic people until my mother was part of the family. She must have seen or heard something negative said about hispanic people and now judges all hispanic people the same way. The judgment on my grandmother’s part is very unfair. She has not met every hispanic person in the world, so she can’t say that all hispanic people are illerterate and dangerous. She could say that a group of hispanic people was beating on a single person or wasn’t able to read, but as the author suggests we should not judge everyone by one man or just one specific incident. Which the first way the author gives to stop stereotyping is to “become aware of the standardized pictures in our heads, in other people’s heads, in the world around us” (Heilbroner pg.424 (6)). The author’s second way to stop stereotyping people is that “we can become suspicious of all judgments that we allow exceptions to prove” (Heilbroner pg.427 (18)). Heilbroner describes an incident where an older person says that all teenagers are wild, and when he meets a teenager who is responsible he says that this one particular teenager is an exception to the rule. When I was in elementary school we had a lot of Hispanics and European students and very few African Americans, and in my grade there was only one African American student who was brought up just like me. It would have been so easy for me to fall for the idea that all African Americans are just like me, but because I went to high school and was mostly populated with more African Americans than the other ethnicity; I did not believe this stereotype. I could have looked my African American friend in elementary school as an exception to the rule, but chose instead to believe that there were many African American brought up very differently from how my friend from elementary school was raised. So, now I understand why many people do stereotype them. I am Chinese and Dominican. When I use to take my grandmother out to the senior center or to meet with one of her friends; my grandmother would introduce me to them as her grandson. They would all say that I am not her grandson since I don’t look Chinese at all. I was so surprised how Chinese people don’t really consider me to be Chinese and this goes along with my Dominican side too. In the Chinese world I look hispanic and in the hispanic world I look Asian. Basically, I do not belong in either ethnicity, but yet I was raised with both of their cultures. This would be the third way to stop stereotyping people “we can be chary of generalizations about people” (Heilbroner 36). We cannot make generalizations with people who may look a certain way. How true would this be if we were to do this, we could say that all Muslims are terrorists, that all Asians are bad drivers, that all Canadians say “eeh” and that all Hispanic are dangerous and dark colored. These are some examples of generalizations. There is never an all or nothing situation with people. People tend to breaks down into an individual’s person, and each person is unique and original. Each person is as individual as their genetic genes or their bone structure. Not even identical twins have the exact same bone structure. And the bone or skeletal structure of our bodies we each leave in this world is an individual thing, and cannot be put into a stereotype of any sort. Heilbroner’s essay is a good way to tell everyone that we were all created equal, but very differently. Works Cited
Heilbroner, Robert. “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your judgments.” Between Worlds: A Reader, Rhetoric, and Handbook. 7th Edition.” Pages 424-427