One thing that has struck me while lurking these forums is the amount of stereotypes I have encountered.
There seems to be so many apparently good christian people (and some non-christians) pre-judging people that they have never met based on stereotypes. For a good example, look at souljaboys rants in the threads about gay people, and a lot of the thing autumnleaf says about, well, everything.
How ethical is it to judge entire groups of people as stereotypes rather than individuals?
Stereotypes can act as a very basic guide as to what to expect from a person, but there seems to be a distinct lack of recognition that people are individuals rather than just part of a group that is stereotyped.
Has anybody else noticed this? And what are your thoughts?
IMO, to understand stereotypes properly requires an appreciation for how we as humans evolved.
Tens of thousands of years ago, human knowledge was extremely limited compared to what it is today. Much of it was little more than cause-effect relations: Deer = food. Bright red frog = poison. River = drinking water. Lion = predator. Man of a different skin color = enemy. The problem is that millennia before the scientific method was invented, humans lacked the foreknowledge that you and I have to realize that tap water = relatively safe, untreated well water = less safe, river water = least safe.
Why did this evolve? Consider the Stone Age human who challenges the notion that "Man of a different skin color = enemy." Instead of running back to his camp and warning his tribe of an imminent attack, or taking his spear and killing the man, he attempts to negotiate. Unfortunately for him, that other man also believes "Man of a different skin color = enemy." So our first man receives a complimentary spear in his chest. He dies, so he cannot reproduce, so his mindset dies with him. The racists that remain back in the camp are the ones whose bloodlines, and thus mindsets, continue on.
Here's the other problem, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it in
The Panda's Thumb: While cultural evolution has reached breakneck speeds in the last two centuries, Darwinian evolution hasn't accelerated one bit. This means that we are living in a Computer Age world with Stone Age minds: still powerful, but riddled with flaws. Thus the "Man of a different skin color = enemy" belief that is hardwired into the human mind has to be actively overcome.
That's right, I believe that racism is at least to some extent, innate. That's part of what makes it so darn hard to overcome. The same goes with stereotypes in general, to get back to the OP: They're simply a reflection of our Stone Age minds that do not always take the time to analyze the situation beforehand, so that we do not always have to make a heat-of-the-moment decision.
Even so, that is no excuse to stereotype. A more ethical conclusion to reach than "that's just the way it is," would be to realize that because of this weakness, the human mind needs to be actively trained to overcome stereotypes. We have to allow ourselves to be taught to assess individuals on their merits, which take time to learn; not race or gender, which we can learn immediately.
I think its naive, and often down right dangerous, not to stereotype. I'm the type of guy who can meet a mugger's stare in a dark alley and he will probably walk away. Its not that I'm some superman, I'm more like the guy from the Death Wish movies where the punks size him up and sort of slink away. They could probably take him, but not without a fight. Why fight when an easier mark is probably just around the corner, or on the next bus/subway etc...
See above.
Living in the 21st century, we have a whole host of options available to us that our Stone Age ancestors did not have: We can study a crime map to see where the most likely places in town to be mugged are. We can take martial arts (a somewhat less recent invention, but its current versions have evolved considerably since their early days). We can learn how to overcome stereotypes and assess people on a person-by-person, not group-by-group, basis.
Society seems to be teaching people to be almost willfully naive about potentially dangerous people and situations.
Though it is possible to go to the other extreme and ignore what really are bad situations, in my experience what's really going on there is simply miscommunication. It's important to follow up the line of "Don't be afraid of a black man on the street corner, simply because he is black, thus you feel like he could mug you or rape you." with, "But in the unlikely event he does something, you do have the right to defend yourself." See? This allows for the person struggling with stereotype issues to not let their fear convince them that they are being told not to defend themselves. Again, if we would assess people on a case-by-case basis, without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., we would do ourselves an ENORMOUS favor.
Careful
.those lesbians always pack heat 
