Struggling with Stereotypes

Before we began this class I never really thought that media had such an impact on the stereotypes we create.  I thought that it was more what we learned through our parents or are peers, but even those people had to hear it from somewhere, right? I found this stereotype article very interesting. At first I was worried that it was going to be attacking certain races  and trying to show all the ways they have been oppressed. Instead it gave examples of things such as school subjects and how teachers are taught to show students all the ways that they can be generalized into specific categories.  I also liked how this article didn’t say that generalizations or labels were necessarily a bad thing but rather they can be very beneficial if they are used in the correct manner. I liked the light switch  sample of generalization  that was used at the beginning of the article. I never really looked at it in that way before.  We do often think that just because we know one person from a specific “group” that means we know everyone associated within that group. There were numerous points made on stereotyping throughout this article that I thought were very provoking. For example the stereotype that all Italians were involved in some type of crime  (due to the depictions from “The Godfather” ) were quite prevalent in society for a while.  It’s funny how you don’t even realize that you are creating these labels just from watching a movie. I would like to think that media doesn’t have that much power over me cognitively but it’s quite scary to see that it actually does. Overall, I thought that this article made many good points and defiantly changed my view on just how much we stereotype.