Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 5:13 pm Post subject: Re: Painting people with the same brush
MassDebation wrote:
Is this acceptable in this day and age?
In essence yep. I can't understand why we're always being told to go completely against things which we're genetically designed to do such as using first impressions to work out how to respond to something.
If we go back in time a few 1000 years - early man sees a lion standing in front of him. He/she immediately thinks "hmm, lion, first impression....dangerous!!". It might turn out the lion has just fed and has no interest in him, but that first impression might save his life the next time.
Bring the story forward a bit. A guy walks down the street and sees a group of teenagers hanging around in baseball caps and such. He thinks, hmm, that's exactly what street gangs wear and thus crosses the road. It could be this group work for the Salvation Army at a weekend and wouldn't harm a fly, but it's sometimes better to be cautious and later find out that in this case your impression was wrong.
Quote:
Surely we have met enough people of different nationalities, faiths, race, etc to know that every individual is different and unique?
We claim to be unique, but if you look at the human race we don't half seem to have a lot of similarities. An example would be the so called "hoodies" which are teenagers all wearing baseball caps and such.
As I see it, the problem isn't so much grouping people per se, but more that the basic facts for many of the groups are just plain wrong. For example there was the old idea that somehow black people weren't as intellegent which we know these days to be absolute rubbish, but there are still people who will use these kinds of groupings to judge people and that's the really major problem.
The only other thing I would say is that above we're talking about first general impressions. One thing that makes us stand out from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to analyse beyond that judgement and go forward to judge individual cases on their merits when we have more information on an individual.
Ah, so it goes beyond racial groups too... onto individual judgements, okay. Sure our first impressions may be lasting, but I was asking more along the lines of "A muslim resulted in 9/11, therefore all muslims are bad" and, like Trev pointed out, the old view that blacks are less intelligent than whites, etc.
Can you honestly say that you never make certain assumptions about people which may or may not be unfounded? For example, when you meet someone for the first time... you get an impression of what they are like, but you can sometimes be totally wrong. When you're wrong, isn't that because you've maybe painted them with the same brush as someone else who you thought might be of similar background?
Aaron
I used to big time! I pretty much grew up rather racist, so I've certainly done that before!
So I've learned to "always reserve judgement for later" as Confuscius once said... or something to that effect.
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