Monday, May 24, 2010
Stereotypes
One stereotype that failed to hold true was that Asians are good law abiding citizens. However, the "China Man" was the character who was found to be smuggling Thai people into the United States to sell. Another example of a character who did not hold a stereotype was Daniel, a Mexican locksmith. When he was fixing Jeans locks after she had gotten mugged, she makes comments about him being a gang-banger and that he is going to sell the keys to his "homies". However, Daniel is actually a shy man whose main priority is his little girl. The Persian shopkeeper had the same opinion on Daniel. The shopkeeper felt that since Daniel was Mexican he was trying to rip him off. Daniel tried to tell him that the door was the problem, but because of the shopkeeper's racist attitude, he refused to listen and consequently his shop was broken into. Another type of racism going on was the mix up of what people where calling each other. For example, the Asian woman in the beginning who got in an accident with Ria, a Hispanic detective, and the Asian woman calls Ria Mexican when she is not. Also, when the Persian shopkeeper goes to buy a gun, the clerk makes a lot of racist comments about him being a terrorist and associating him with Arabs which once again is grouping someone based on looks into a sterotype. John Ryan, the white police officer, has some stereotypes on himself too. While we focus little on how John is stereotyped because of how much he stereotypes, he himself is also stereotyped by other characters and the audience. We assume that such racist people come from racist back grounds, but we find out that John's father is not racist. We find out that why he is racist is because affirmative action caused his father not to get the amount of money and health care John believes he deserves. This consequently causes John to have to deal with his father's medical problems and not be able to help him because he doesn't have the money, so he blames all black people for affirmative action. I have found myself stereotyping people who dress scrub-like with baggy pants and giant t-shirts, not so much by skin color but by clothing. I know that a lot of times I'm wrong about people who wear clothes like this, but I know that I was socially constructed this way. At the same time I've been judged right back by the same people. I went to a friend's house in wheeling once and when I walked in a girl walks past and says for me to hear, "who is this white girl". The thing that suprised me the most is that I thought she was white too. From that I realized that if situations were flipped I probably would have wondered what a wheeling girl was doing with Stevenson people. What I've come to realize through sociology is that we all need to stop judging each other. Yes, sometimes we may be right, but most of the time we can miss out on getting to know really great people because of false judgements.
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