The Outstater
Stereotype Fatigue
THERE ARE TWO TYPES of people, my grandmother would say, those who believe there are two types of people and those who don’t. This is the paradox of stereotypes.
If we were to be honest, most of us at least notice stereotypes if not act on them. It is built into our DNA — wrongly so, the progressives lecture, something that must be torn from the social fabric at all cost.
Well, good luck with that. You will have the devil of a time changing human nature — as Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao demonstrated to the world’s great horror.
A friend has been taught the wrongness of stereotyping since childhood. Over lunch the other day, though, he confessed that actual experience has taught him something quite else. He now assumes a stereotype until it is proven wrong, which to his credit he mightily attempts to do in every case he comes across.
Still, is he a racist or worse? Or is he simply a fellow who when he sees a group of young men in an alley late at night doesn’t assume they are a string quartet comparing notes on a fugue?
Let’s just say he takes another route home. Those who bemoan stereotypes never address this, that is, the fact stereotypes can be both valid and prescient. An exhaustive paper reviewing six decades of research, “The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes” (Rutgers, Lee Jussim, et al.), concludes that you can pretty much bet on it.
Researchers found that stereotypes can be empirically grounded and reflect real group differences. Indeed, stereotype accuracy is one of the most replicable effects in social psychology, the authors say, with the large number of stereotypes showing moderate to high correlations with real-world data.
Also recently, several research papers have addressed the supposed stereotype effect on testing, particularly “stereotype threat,” the risk of underperforming on tests due to negative stereotypes about your group’s abilities. It turns out there is no such “threat,” except in the minds of woke academics fishing for research grants.
Nor do attempts to depict as supremacists those who express pride in Western Civilization find traction. To apply a damaging stereotype, it seems, you must have more than an anecdote or two and you cannot torture history to make your case.
The late Walter Williams was asked as a black academic what he thought about the campaign against police profiling in high-crime areas. His answer shocked the reporter: “I strive not to behave in a way that includes me in any group whose profiling makes sense to the police.”
I could say something similar as a stiff-necked German, industrious but boring. And a friend from a Gypsy family makes every effort not to broadcast shiftlessness (he has earned two doctorates). At the same time, he is not interested in changing the perception that his lifestyle leaves plenty of time for friendship and community.
If there is any good in stereotyping beyond pattern recognition, it is here — that it forces us to realize that we are ultimately responsible for how others view us.
Intelligence tests during the first World War purported to show that Jewish servicemen were not very bright, reinforcing a stereotype at the time. Need we say how that is holding up?
Ditto for every other maligned group in U.S. history, or at least for those who make a sincere attempt to share the American ethos. Yes, it can take too long, but that can be the fault of the stereotypees as well as the stereotypers. — tcl
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