Stereotyping In Society

Stereotyping is a way of categorizing certain groups of people or types of individuals with regards to gender, race, culture, religion etc. Stereotyping arises from prior assumptions due to influences by the media, history and personal experience. The statement: “To gain an understanding of the world we need to make use of stereotypes,” appears that stereotyping is required in order to really understand the world, and knowledge issues can be drawn from this statement: Does stereotyping prevent us from knowing someone truly and how are stereotypes created in the first place? One way to examine and discuss the knowledge issues is to look at different areas of knowledge, which in our case will be History and Human Science. Since the concept of stereotyping holds a broad scope, the essay will narrow down the focus to ethnic groups and their culture.
If we assume that the use of stereotypes helps us to gain an understanding of the world, we may establish different profiles and characterizations on certain groups of people. For example: Jews are greedy, Muslims are terrorists, black people are criminals, Americans are obese, homosexuals are weak and so on. These assumptions are typical examples and have become so common today, that people may mistake them to be correct classifications of the certain groups and types of individuals, because they have been misunderstood or generalized due to one incident as well as influenced by certain factors. For example, History has played a