Stereotypes: A Poem Summary

“Go ahead and tell me that you know all I can be, you’ve studied every droplet of my ever-changing sea. But weren’t you ever taught that seas are only where it ends? The things that tell the story are the river’s twists and bends. The ocean isn’t everything, it’s part of it of course, but you cannot judge its currents if you don’t know their source ~ Erin Hanson.” This poem presents an analogy which purpose is to figuratively portray the assumptions one makes of another without knowing their truth. It reveals the prevalent occurrence of stereotypes in society and metaphorically expresses that one cannot know all that there is to a person based off of a certain quality or general belief.

This assertion applies in a more general perspective because it is to be heard where stereotypes exist, which evidently is everywhere. Stereotypes have come to create a strong influence on society and is discreetly hurting the way one sees themself and their surroundings. For example, Sociologist Min-Hsiung-Huang recently decided to ask whether the race of the person administering the survey mattered: He found that when black people and white people answered 10 vocabulary questions posed by a White interviewer, blacks on average answered 5.49 questions correctly and whites answered 6.33 correctly—a gap typical of the ones found on many standardized test (cited from: How a Self Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance.) In the article, “How a Self Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance,” it states the reason African Americans scored more poorly on tests administered by white interviewers, Huang theorized, is that these situations can make the issue of race salient and subtly remind the test takers of the societal stereotype that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.” Thus, showing the effect stereotypes can have on self performance and self image. Although this piece targets the effect identified as a “Stereotype Threat” there are many more involved. Such as attributional ambiguity, self-fulfilling prophecy, and self-stereotyping. All which have a negative impact on the person receiving the