“Man is a typing animal.”
A tree is a type of plant, a conifer is a type of tree, a conifer has a different type of seed than a deciduous tree. Our brains are wired to find meaningful distinctions that help us make decisions, as individuals, that allow us to survive long enough to breed. We discriminate between the various parts of one single whole, that is called the Universe by most people, the multiverse by avant garde physicists, and God by pantheists. We can’t help it.
In natural philosophy, we arrange systematic hierarchies of types and we bicker endlessly about the distinctive characters of individual holotypes and the designation of paratypes and whether cladistics is really a tempest in a tea kettle and how to resolve Aristotle, Linnaeus and Crick. It’s because types - which are a fundamental feature of how we perceive both what is and what might be - are a hard-wired necessity of all our means of communication and nearly all our modes of thought. This type of thing, here in my hand, is named this.
Naming is deeply, profoundly important if you are a human animal; wide agreement on what comprises a category that should receive a name is necessary for the collaborative effort we inadequately call human progress. Communication of the most basic sort (“bring me the shiny sky blue thing!”) is impossible without discrimination of objects and assignment of types. The arguments of taxonomists are functionally the same in physics labs and in the stacks of Kew Gardens; we are trying to agree which characteristics of this group of trees/fermions/mollusks/bosons/humans differentiate it from any other group. Every mother teaches her baby its first types - what is an object of type nipple, what isn’t an object of type mother, etc.
Prior to the 20th century, stereograms and stereotypes were physical objects produced by printing identical images. One finds many references in old literature of natural science. Of course, those physical images weren’t really completely identical - but if they merited the name, they were indistinguishable and interchangeable for a purpose - and that purpose was often identification. This is a stereotype of the fugitive, have you seen him?
But in the 1920s or so, some psychologists mixed everything I just wrote all up in a hat, and pulled out a rabbit that we now call a stereotype. Without looking it up, I would say that stereotypes are informal, sloppy categories based on inadequate information or overgeneralization from insufficient experience; they can be negative (your wife ran away with a black man, therefore all black men cannot be trusted) or positive (English people sure do talk pretty, because Masterpiece Theater) or both, or neither. The interpretation of whether a stereotype is positive or negative can vary with the context and the person doing the interpreting, too (Mormons and Sihks have special underpants, because they are special). Psychologists argue over stereotypes like zoologists argue over holotypes.
Stereotypes are only rarely completely inaccurate - for example, anybody with the ability to identify delicious food likes fried chicken and watermelon, so it’s mostly true that African-American people like fried chicken and watermelon. Let’s face it, that stuff is good. There are easily understood historical reasons why these quintessentially “Southern” foods became stereotypically “Black” (and there’s no good reason not to enjoy them regardless of your ethnicity).
It’s true there are stereotypes that have absolutely no basis in history or reality, entirely created by malice or miscommunication, but most stereotypes are created by overgeneralization from observed data. In a word, by ignorance. If a stereotype was one hundred percent, infallibly accurate, it would be a category, a description, or a tautology, and not a stereotype at all.
Stereotypes are not necessarily harmful (racism isn’t necessarily harmful, either) but they are great enablers of harmful (wait for it) discrimination. The designation of approved victims for lynching, the designation of the children of sin, whatever some opportunist or ideologue with an agenda wants the less informed to believe.
That’s all I got. I think people who snidely invoke stereotypes as a form of ad hominem attack make themselves look both ignorant and mean-spirited. I think people who refuse to acknowledge that stereotypes are a product of ignorance and at best represent only some sort of mythical median are kidding themselves. I hope I’ve explained why.
