Blog B

As I was reading the Lippman chapter about Stereotypes as Defense, I found myself making a connection to an event that happened earlier that day. I had to run into a store in New Castle and my friends decided just to wait for me in the car. While I was gone a black man pulled up and parked next to my car. He kept starring at my friends and they got nervous and locked the doors. He then got out of his car and knocked on the window of my car, which made my friends feel extremely nervous at this point. The put the window down just a tiny bit and asked him what he wanted. He said, “do you guys go to Mohawk?” and after they assured him they did not he got back into his car and left.
When I got back into the car they told me the situation and thought it probably had something to do with a drug deal and that was the code question. I myself thought nothing of their comment, but later as I was reading I began to think about the situation and what was said. Lippman explains that if people have a pre-conceived image in their head of a certain type of person then they can interpret a situation to reinforce that idea. Just as my friends might have used this situation to reinforce the image of drug dealer or even a black man, Lippman explains, “If what we are looking at corresponds successfully with what we anticipated, the stereotype is reinforced for the future, as it is in a man who knows in advance that the Japanese are cunning and has the bad luck to run across two dishonest Japanese”(Lippman p. 55). Luckily enough I have had other experiences with black people and I do not use this situation to reinforce that stereotype, but there are some people the may not feel the same way. Say for an example that situation occurred to a student who was from a town with an all white population. That situation might have reinforced a stereotype they had. So to me a stereotype would be a conception that a person has or an image that they carry with them until they learn otherwise. That is why taking a multicultural education class, or a minority/majority class could benefit people by ridding them of these misconceptions.