stereotype

a stereotype (the word comes from the process of duplicating printing plates made from set type) is "the continual portrayal of a group of people with the same narrow set of characteristics.... It shows a cultural bias toward the characteristics of one's own culture, painting characters outside that culture in limiting and sometimes dehumanizing ways" (Linda Seger, Creating Unforgettable Characters). Stereotypes are quick and convenient because they require no thought. For the same reason, they are often inaccurate—and racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, or ethnocentric. "The holder of a stereotype will accept any information, no matter how improbable, which reinforces the image. Conversely, the holder will discard as irrelevant any data which does not confirm the stereotype" (Marsha J. Hamilton, in Joanna Kadi, Food for Our Grandmothers). In his classic 1922 study of the forces that shape popular consciousness, Walter Lippmann said that when the "charm of the familiar" was imperiled, people will go to extremes to preserve and defend their version of things as they are. "No wonder," he wrote, "that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack on the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the foundations of our universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any difference between our universe and the universe." Lippman said that stereotypes "mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange is sharply alien." According to Elizabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen (Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality): "The Christian Right has played an important role in the resurrection of typecasting as a strategy of power.... Ministers routinely tell their congregations that God is angry with those who question stipulated stereotypes of family, community, religion, and patriotism. Challenges to sexual codes of belief are particularly diabolical and rampant across the land. It is the responsibility of good Christians, congregations are instructed, to uphold timeless definitions of good and evil, to save America from the devils of secularization. At the vortex of this imperative, homosexuality and the autonomy of women are typecast as the most ominous threats to morality and to life."