Why Stereotyping? Why make the world more complicated?

Realize or not sometimes people have some kind of stereotype about other people. Stereotype is a generalization about a person or group of persons; it can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the other group hold in common. It is a way of representing and judging other people. People may be grouped according to religion, gender, race, ethnicity or any number of other categories

We usually have our own thinking about negative or positive thing in our life and it also affects our thought about people around us. In my country Indonesia for instance, there is a large variety of races, cultures, and religions live together. Can we imagine if the people who belong to the minority clash with the majority group? It happened in Indonesia in May 1998, and also could happen in many part of this world. Personally, I saw what it means to have a stereotype based on your race. It happened during the fall of the second president of Indonesia, Soeharto, were there are riots in some part of the cities with minority race as its victim done by majority race (It was between indigenous people and Chinese). The indigenous people burn the Chinese’s houses and stores. They feel that Chinese people take over most of the economic resources and do not give the opportunity to them. The situation was very terrible, a lot of people, mostly Chinese, were afraid to go out from their house. And some of them choose to leave the country and move to another country.

I have experienced the thrill because my family is Chinese. I cannot understand why some people have extreme stereotype about other people and try to harm them. If I think about my friends or my neighbors from different races, they are not like that; they do not fit with the stereotypes. Most stereotypes tend to make us feel superior in some way to the person or group being stereotyped. Stereotypes ignore the uniqueness of individuals by painting all members of a group with the same brush. We can not judge people based on their race, the idea is not right and can be destructive. It took more than just look at their race and formed an opinion about what kind of people they are. It is not an easy task, because our society often innocently creates stereotypes and its often lead to unfair discrimination and persecution. But we can change it by change our negative thinking about other people. We should change it if we wish to live in a better world.