By Deepal Chadha

All South Asians are cheap and good at math right? No? Ok, not all of them but most of them, right? No? Oh ok, you’re one of those… crazy liberals. So you’re telling me that all those things my parents say about Punjabis, Gujuratis and South Indians are false?

I’ve always been unsettled by stereotypes. Are they true or false? Right or wrong? Can a stereotype be simultaneously true and false? These questions lead me to the theory on racial stereotypes I worked on for my Harvard sociology thesis*. Say, for instance, sixty percent of Smurfs are short and sixty percent of Smurfs are good at crossword puzzles. Our perception of Smurfs will likely be that they are a short people that are good at crossword puzzles. In some sense, that’s not such an unreasonable perception and it’s actually based on certain truths. However, if you apply this to the individual and assume that the Smurf you see across the street is both short and good at crossword puzzles, you will likely be wrong. And forget morally, I mean factually. Think back to those Venn-diagrams we learned in middle school. The overlap. It’s possible that only ten percent of Smurfs are both short and good at crossword puzzles. In fact, if you assume that every demographic make-up is equally likely, it’s only twenty percent likely that the majority of Smurfs are both short and good at crossword puzzles. Insert any nationality for Smurfs and any stereotypes for being short and good at crossword puzzles.

I think this is how stereotypes operate. We see these circles of majorities within a group of people, meld them together to form our perception of the group as a whole, and then subconsciously apply that to the Smurf we see across the street. However, it’s not wise to apply stereotypes of groups rigidly to individuals, even if the stereotypes are based on certain truths. You’re likely to be wrong. There’s also a huge difference between the theoretical example above and what we do in reality. In reality, when I notice that sixty percent of Smurfs are short, that isn’t because sixty percent of Smurfs are short, but rather, sixty percent of the Smurfs I know of are short. What we know of comes from our own limited circle of acquaintances and the media. A representative sample? More like a skewed distribution. Vijay Prashad points out in Karma of Brown Folk that the special-skills provisions in the 1965 Immigration Act skew the South Asian population in America towards professionals. It’s actually sort of scary. I personally don’t have many black friends. Where does my perception of African Americans come from? Probably the media. That’s scary. I don’t trust the media.

Ok, so then do we cast off stereotypes just like that? Luckily it turns out we don’t have a choice (Yessss! Damn that free will!) There are all these pitfalls to stereotypes, yet we’re all going to use them anyways, subconsciously making snap judgments about people before our consciousness gets back in control and smacks our id in the face. Think you’re different? Take the race implicit association test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html). Americans overwhelmingly have an automatic preference for white over black. What we need to do is acknowledge our inevitable bigotry and focus on informing our stereotypes in much the same way as Malcolm Gladwell suggests we inform our gut in Blink; read books, turn to alternative media sources, and try to expose ourselves to a more accurate sample of people (nuts, personal responsibility…) That being said, there’s really no way we can expose ourselves to everything, so we’re going to have to be extremely skeptical of our own snap judgments. You know what they (I) say; in the end, we’re all just mirrors.

* denotes points in the essay where I’m lying