How I Learnt the Meaning of Courage
“Wow, are you even an athlete? You can’t be on my team,” said the first team he wanted to join.
“We don’t take losers who always lose in the first match itself,” said the second team he wanted to join.
“No, you will be a disgrace to our team, little chubby boy” said the third team and final team he wanted to join.
I could see his desperate eyes rolling down the ground, a shadow walking away to the classroom.
Of the three teams that rejected him, I could not complain about the first two teams who had rejected him for a purpose, but for the third team, I was pretty upset about how our society was. It was not for his athleticism that the third team rejected him, but for his background and the way he looked like when I asked the third team why did they reject him?
This is called a stereotype. In social psychology, a stereotype is an over-generalized belief about a particular category of people. For him, it was his background of bullying and the dark colour of his skin that the third team rejected him.
Archetypes Of Stereotypes
Social science has produced three comprehensive approaches to stereotypes. The economic approach sees stereotypes as a manifestation of statistical discrimination: rational formation of beliefs about a group member in terms of the aggregate beliefs about that group. For example, if employers hold adverse beliefs about the skills of black workers, blacks would underinvest in education, thereby fulfilling the adverse prior beliefs. However, because in this theory stereotypes are based on rational expectations, it does not address a central problem that stereotypes are often inaccurate. The vast majority of Florida residents are not elderly, the vast majority of the Irish are not red-headed, and flying is pretty safe.
The sociological approach to stereotyping pertains only to social groups. It views stereotypes as fundamentally incorrect and derogatory generalizations of group traits, reflective of the stereotyper’s underlying prejudices. Social groups that have been historically mistreated, such as racial and ethnic minorities, continue to suffer through bad stereotyping, perhaps because the groups in power want to perpetuate false beliefs about them. The stereotypes against blacks are thus rooted in the history of slavery and continuing discrimination. This approach might be relevant in some important instances, but it leaves a lot out.
The third approach to stereotypes — and the one we follow — is the social cognition approach. This approach gained ground in the 1980s and views social stereotypes as special circumstances of cognitive schemas or theories. These theories are intuitive generalizations that individuals routinely use in their common life, and involve savings on cognitive resources. Stereotypes are selective, however, in that they are localized around group features that are the most distinctive, that provide the greatest differentiation between groups, and that show the least within-group variation.
How Can We Eradicate Stereotyping?
I could say there is no way to change a person's mindset by others influence; it is only he who could change his mindset. Most of them would say we need to educate more people, but I can say education can’t do much about stereotypes from my point of view.
Firstly for education different society takes it in different views. for example-Education during the Nazi’s term was all about hating jews. Secondly, In some societies in the world, education focuses only on academics but not on morality. But don’t get me wrong all education is not like that ,As I mentioned Only an ample(South Korea,Japan,United States of America Etc.) of them have about changing the mentality of students. Perhaps it is through the heart we can learn to love for love becomes more natural to human heart as quoted by Nelson Mandela.
‘No one is born hating another person because of his colour of skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love becomes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite’ — Nelson Mandela “Long Walk to Freedom”
Now coming back to the story which I had been telling at the beginning, as he was walking towards his classroom, he stopped at the midway, turned and ran back to the ground. He said to the peering athletes, “I am not a blockhead whose self-esteem can be blown down that easily. I’ll create my own team, and we’ll win this competition.”.
I was astonished by the way how he spoke up not only for him but also for the players who looked short and stocky like him. He called my name and a few others, but I was not satisfied as there were more players to be picked and sadly that was it. We entered the competition and lost the first knockout match with a bitter score of 0–5 (Soccer Tournament). While most of our team members were upset, I and my friend whom I was talking about were not sorry to walk away from the ground with the least satisfaction. Till now I admire the incident that changed the whole outlook of the oppressed students.
ABOUT ME:
Hi! I am Aadin currently 16 year old , Highly interested to pursue Artificial Intelligence as my career . There a lot of things which occupy my free-time , but to generalize I’d pick Coding , Reading , Writing and a Political Mindset!Check out My Instagram Page To know more of my passions and get in touch with Me!
