When we look at a person, we rarely see them just as who they are. We place them in a group based on their race, ethnicity and a variety of other factors before getting to see the person as an individual.
Recently, we have begun to see the negative consequences of this type of thinking. As the United States turned its attention to the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, the dangers of stereotyping have been exposed. Since the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, stereotyping can no longer be ignored.
Brown and Garner were both African American men and are just the most recent lives to be lost due to stereotyping. Both men were unarmed African Americans who were killed at the hands of the police. While some facts of their deaths might be unclear, most concluded that both men were victims of racial profiling.
Racial profiling, an action that relies on stereotypes about race rather than seeing that person as an individual, caused these men to be treated differently than someone of a different race. They are not the only ones who were subject to this faulty thinking.
A 2005 U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that African Americans were twice as likely to be arrested during a traffic stop and three times as likely to be searched at one of these stops. The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that prison sentences for African American men were 20% longer than white men who committed similar crimes. African American and white populations use drugs at very close rates, yet African Americans were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for drug use, according to the Human Rights Watch.
All of these statistics are due to viewing African Americans not as individuals, but rather as part of a group that has been looked down upon and viewed as different for centuries. In order to change these statistics, we must start seeing people as individuals.
This issue of stereotyping is simply easier than seeing people as individuals. When someone is part of a group, it requires more thought, more time and more energy to take them out of that group. It is harder to give them an identity as a person than is required to clump them together with a group, whether that group be race, gender, or something more trivial.
We use this quick thinking daily; although, luckily for us, people aren’t usually killed due to our faulty thinking. We do, however, lose the opportunity to see people as who they actually are when we stereotype them.
We might not see the football player as more than an athlete, when he is actually an amazing writer. We might think of the artist as not having any athletic ability, when she is an important member of the cross-country team. We might think of the student who isn’t in all AP courses as not as smart, when he actually just wants to focus his energy on things outside of class.
No one can be placed in one category, and no one can be judged based on one aspect of his or herself. When we start seeing people as individuals, we start to realize how unique we all are.
When we see people as individuals, we are giving them value and worth. People are more than just the group that they are part of, so it is time we start viewing them as so.
