bL0wg6pOszxt 7: "Stereotype"

Have you ever experienced a moment wherein you just doing your stuff and suddenly, your head turn into a different direction making you to notice someone? Things start to build up in your mind, right? For a instance, what is the first thing that enters your mind when you see a Muslim man with his entire face covered with beard? A terrorist, right What about seeing an Indian? Immediately, you’ll think of the common terms such as “Bumbay”and “5-6”. Well how about seeing a Jejemon? 

I had done a survey among 10 people to know what their first impression is whenever they see or had an encounter with a Jejemon. Unsurprisingly, 9 out of 10 answered too much negative thing about them. Some of which include harsh words such as overacting (OA), “korni”, attention-seeker, arrogant, pride, boastful, “maangas”, off-fashion, immature, outdated, cheap, funny in a sarcastic way and irritating. One answered that she thinks Jejemons are cool since they are unique and colorful. Well this only shows that Jejemons have more negative impressions than positive.

Impressions lead to stereotyping. I feel pity for myself as I answered the activities found in Module One - Diversity in Employment: Disability Awareness, Lesson #1: Stereotypes and Perceptions in the site Empower Missouri Training Website. This site provides the activities to show how one’s impression affects perception and judgment. There are two activities, first is about the impression wherein you should guess what job the person has based on the picture given and the second one is about the impressions to people with disabilities. To be honest, I got the answers almost all wrong. Why? In my opinion, it is because in our nature to be judgmental and to stereotype people based on what you think they are based on our past experiences, exposure to media and family experiences.

What do we mean by stereotyping? From the article Stereotypes by Saul McLeod in the site SimplyPsychology, stereotype is defined as a general and fixed belief about a specific group of people. It is a subjective opinion in labeling people based on their looks, background or even the way they speak. The article also mentioned that stereotyping enables one to respond rapidly in situations since we already perceived it to most likely to happen. But on the other hand, it lets us ignore the differences between individuals since our mentality is already locked with what we think is “right”. Racial stereotyping also is a problem. This leads to the feeling of superiority or inferiority, and based on the articles, Americans are more likely to be stereotyped as industrious, progressive and ambitious while the African-Americans are lazy, ignorant and music people.

In the site Campus Times, an article entitled Stereotyping sometimes has its benefits written by Campus Times, somehow contradicted the notion that stereotyping is not a good idea. Because of stereotyping, those people categorized try their best to change the image embedded to them by the society. They also encourage people to fit into what they should be. In addition to that, stereotyping is considered an organizational tool because you tend to imagine what is likely to happen or what type of person someone is which saves you from a trouble you might go through.

For me, one’s impression is highly influenced by stereotyping since we tend to judge someone based on what we are seeing. Honestly, I view Americans as superior to us Filipinos but view Chinese people as heartless people because of their one-child policy which lets them to abort babies and sometimes feast on eating their fetus. Based on my experience, my perception about people is based on what I see. I never try to get myself involved with them and get to know them well. This is one of the problems I can see in my topic. People tend to discriminate Jejemons because they are regarded as people with low intelligence, being off-fashion, burgles, troublemakers and many other rude words. The reason is that people don’t know much about you. They knew only few and insignificant things which they think make you up. Because their impression for you is something not nice, they tend to stereotype you as someone you are not. And from there, you will be discriminated and in order for you to overcome discrimination, you try to put walls and pretend something you’re not or assert whatever people are labeling you. Because of that, the labels they are giving you which you prove you are not are the reason why people hate you.

In conclusion, people need to stop labeling or stereotyping because that is mainly one of the reasons why people don’t get to understand each other. They should use it in a good way not in a bad one. Let’s just be considerate enough and do our best to understand the differences we have. We should not judge other people by the way he/she dresses, speaks or acts. We never know what he/she is going through. We deserve equality.