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“Hey man did you see the Lakers game last night it was amazing, man Kobe scored 81 points, I wish I could do that,” Josh said to Vinny. Vinny replied, “Kobe is black what do you expect, and I wish you could do that too you would be the first Asian in the world to be good at basketball; for now I think you should stick with your math class, your people seem to do pretty good at that kind of stuff.” This conversation is a classic example of racial stereotyping. A stereotype is a learned attitude that has an impact of on our everyday lives. Stereotypes are generalizations made about a group of people that are usually based on inaccurate or incomplete information, they can be both positive and negative, but both can have negative consequences. In the essays “Black Men and Public Spaces,” written by Brent Staples, “Los Pobres,” by Richard Rodriguez, and “The Men We Carry in our Minds,” written by Scott Sanders, all tell their true life first hand stories of their interactions with many different types of stereotypes. Stereotyping is a large problem and we catch ourselves doing it every day and when we look back in history and even in current history we see that it has always has been a problem and will still continue to be one.
When a person stereotyped they lose their individuality and they are immediately categorized usually negatively. In Staple’s “Black Man and Public Spaces,” Staples describes an instance when he was walking down the street at night, minding his own business and the lady in front of him started to run away like someone was chasing her. Staples was stereotyped as somebody that was a threat to the woman’s safety, just because of the color of his skin. In Rodriguez’s essay serotypes of a Hispanic with a dark completion can be positive or negative depending on the situation and how he presented himself. He describes how if he walked through a service entrance at a hotel, people wouldn’t think much of him but if walks in with a nice...