Dumb Stereotypes

“Stereotypes, are stereotypes for reason.” I am sure most of us have heard this phrase in some capacity. Blonds are dumb, Asians are always better than everyone, and gamers are lazy man-children. Most of these have some ground, in fact, I would say all of them have grounds.
Asians are considered smart, because they tend to excel above and beyond that of most other people. This is a stereotype, because a lot of the time, it’s true.
Blonds are dumb. This is a bit less so as far as what is considered true. Because I have never met a consistently ‘smart’ blond, does that mean that the stereotype is true. Of course it does. Should we blanket all blonds as being dumb? No, of course not.
Video gamers, the good ones, tend to be people( generally
male ) That stay at home, with their parents and live of them while doing nothing but playing video games 24/7. The reason that they all seem like that, is that the really good ones, that you see in the leaderboards and videos are those people that play all the time.
There have been many stereotypes applied to me. Such as, because I am a programmer, I must be good with everything that has to do with a computer, right? How many times have I heard, “Hey, can you get me some gems on (insert online game here)” Oh, of course I am going to hack into a massive gaming network and bust into their servers like the kool-aid man and give you some in game currency that costs actually money and risk getting sent to jail for a few years. By all means I will do that for you.
I have also heard, because I was homeschooled, that is why I am a bit awkward. No, I am awkward because don’t keep up on everything that teenagers do now. I am too busy learning and programming to bother too much with that.
Stereotypes are a lot the time, true, that does not mean however, that we should act upon them. We still do though, in many ways. If you are a young white woman walking down a street in a large city, and a black man is walking down the street towards you, what is your first instinct? Is it to smile and let your purse hang freely and act oblivious? Or is it to clutch your purse tightly and get as close to the other side as possible?
In the book, we see the black stereotype a few times, but it is less prevalent because of the lack of interaction with an outside, white community.
One example would be the debacle with Mr. Lindner not wanting them to move to the neighborhood. The reason for this is because there is a stereotype that black people bring bad things and people with them at that they will disrupt the neighborhood. You see a few more times, where Willy runs away with the money, that is a loose stereotype, in that it shows a black man performing a crime against someone without regards to who they are.
While stereotypes are present throughout the book, they are not as obvious as in some other books. There are many times that stereotypes are referenced, but they are generally not the obvious, such as, the racial prejudice of white people. The white people in Clybourne Park do not want the black people there, because they do not like black people. This, is in and of itself a stereotyping reaction to black people as well. They are shown as being interpreted as bad and bringing bad things with them, such as crimes and being rowdy.
In conclusion, I believe that stereotypes are quite prevalent in the book. Frequently, if not most, of the time the stereotypes are either indirect or are loosely
referenced.