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A summary of, followed
by a response to, Robert Heilbroner’s essay
“Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments.”
In his essay “Don’t Let
Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments” Robert Heilbroner
discusses 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 individual we meet.
According to Heilbroner there is nothing positive
about stereotyping. He states that it makes us lazy thinkers and that
it harms both the people we are stereotyping and ourselves. Heilbroner gives us three ways we can eliminate
stereotyping behavior from our lives.
The first suggestion Heilbroner gives to eliminate stereotyping is to “become aware of the
standardized pictures in our heads, in other people’s heads, in the world
around us” (36). My father believes that all French people are
stupid, rude “Frogs.” I don’t know why he believes this; he doesn’t
even know that many French people. I have never heard my father say
anything positive about a French person. He must have had a negative
experience with one French person and so now judges all French people by
the same yardstick. This judgment on my father’s part is very
unfair. He has not met every French person in the world, so he
cannot say that all French people are stupid and rude. He
could say that one Frenchman he met was that way, but as Heilbroner suggests should not judge all men by one
man.
Heilbroner’s
second suggestion to eliminate stereotyping people is that “we can become suspicious of all
judgments that we allow exceptions to prove” (36). He describes a
situation 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 high school we
did a lot of studying on Nazi Germany, and I specialized my essay writing
on the extermination of the Jews. It would have been so easy for me
to fall for the idea that all Germans were monsters, but because I took
German as a second language from an amazing older German man, I did not
believe this stereotype. I could have looked at him as an exception
to the rule, but chose instead to believe that there were many wonderful
people in Germany during this time that were trapped in a terrible
situation they could do nothing about.
The third suggestion is that “we can be wary of
generalizations about people” (Heilbroner 36).
How true this is. I am Canadian and while working in the tourist
industry in Canada, many people I worked with looked at Americans as being
very rude and opinionated. It was true that some of the tourists we
met from America were rude and opinionated, but just as many were
not. We cannot make generalizations that include a whole nation of
people. If we were to do this, we could say that all Muslims are terrorists, that all Asians are afraid of snakes, (that one was
from my neighbor just last week!!) that all Canadians say “eh” and
that all Americans are rude and opinionated. These are excellent
examples of generalizations to be wary of.
There is never an all or nothing
situation with people. “People” breaks down into an individual
person, and each person is unique and original. Each person is as
individual as their DNA or their fingerprints. Not even identical
twins have the same fingerprint. And the “fingerprint” we each leave
on this world is an individual thing, and cannot be lumped into a
stereotype of any sort. Heilbroner’s essay
is a good reminder that we were all created equal . . . but very, very
different.
Works Cited
Heilbroner, Robert. “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your judgments.” National
Relationship Review 22 August 2002: 34-37
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