STEREOTYPES, PREJUDICE, BOXING - BIOLOGICAL

SHAMING

We have all been stereotyped and felt prejudice over something at one point in
our lives, as we have all stereotyped others and drew up conclusions on them based on
prejudice. The systematic education in the recent years is trying to obliterate both
those notions, guilt-mongering kids - as well as adults - into believing they are
horrible human beings if they do stereotype or have prejudice against other people.
The reason escapes me as I’m a firm believer that education should be upheld by
facts, not opinions. And the fact of the matter is that stereotyping and prejudice are a
part of our DNA as much as our eye color is. Another fact is that, believe it or not,
stereotyping and prejudice aren’t human-exclusive traits. Any species with a whiff of
cognitive ability has them and uses them on daily basis. In my eyes, this can only be
interpreted as a not-so-subtle attempt to equalize two concepts that vaguely share the
same, abstract notion, yet when applied to reality have hardly anything in common. In
order to fully grasp why stereotyping and prejudice are completely biological
processes, there are a few key things I first have to mention: conscious vs
subconscious, self-preservation, patterning and ‘compartmentalization’ (i.e. boxing).

I’d wager a guess that most of us understand the difference between a conscious
and subconscious thought/action. We consciously decide to look left, but
subconsciously ‘decide’ to blink while we’re at it. If we had to consciously make all
decisions, we’d be too overran cognitively by repeatedly ordering cells to regenerate
and blood to pump that we’d have no time for anything else. Subconscious mind is
responsible for the most mundane yet also most important actions our body makes on
daily basis; breathing, blinking, heartbeat, etc. However, it doesn’t stop there. In order
to expand on it, let’s first mention patterning. Human beings are drawn to patterns
naturally - we seek them even when they aren’t there. It’s because we are wired to
seek order in chaos, and patterns are order. That’s how we learn to recognize and
understand certain things. And, believe it or not, our subconscious minds are
repeatedly searching for patterns and integrating them. For instance, if you had a
really spicy chicken a few times over the course of a month that had caused you pain
and discomfort, you will develop averse, subconscious reaction to it whereas your
body will be telling you ‘it’s bad, leave it’. You can, naturally, overturn this through
conscious effort, but that’s something I’ll discuss later. Point is, we are repeatedly
stereotyping and drawing prejudices through our subconscious mind. Every day,
every waking hour. And we do this explicitly through patterns and it has mainly to do
with my second point - self-preservation. Our body’s (and in extension mind’s)
primary function is to survive. Self-preservation - biologically and psychologically -
trump all our other needs. And the prime way our minds do that is through drawing
patterns from nature, and then compartmentalizing them - or, how I like to call it,
boxing them.

As an example, let us say you are walking down the road one day, and a stray dog
suddenly appears. Your mind’s first job is to process whether it’s a threat, so it ‘scans’
the dog; does it seem aggressive? Is it showing signs of attack? It concludes this by
looking back at all previous knowledge and patterns it has observed. Even if you
aren’t particularly knowledgeable about the dogs, for some reason you feel like you
know it won’t attack you. After the mind has determined the dog isn’t a threat, the
next course of action is to look at different parameters and stuff it into a box
somewhere in your mind where the dog’s parameters best fit. The exact thing happens
with people. It’s simply nature to draw conclusions about someone based on the first
impression as we have been wired to do so for hundreds of thousands of years.

The mind’s ‘boxing’ is also natural, as we, again, are drawn to order over chaos;
that’s why, for instance, there’s a box somewhere in there labeled ‘dangerous
animals’ and ‘animals that are OK to pet’. Then that box is broken down into
numerous, smaller boxes. And, layer by layer, we will eventually stuff that dog where
we feel it belongs the best. Again, same case transfers over to people; if you are
meeting someone new, the very first thing mind assesses is whether that person is a
threat. That’s why you feel uncomfortable around some people even though you’ve
just met them. After it concludes whether someone’s a threat or not, you began to
layer the boxes on this person; drawing conclusions based on their clothes,
mannerism, gait, speech, tone, expressions etc., you stuff them somewhere you feel
like they belong and, by doing that, you perhaps assign them some traits
subconsciously that they do not have. For instance, one of the rampaging stereotypes
these days is that all white people are racist. Whether you consciously agree or not,
your subconscious mind will take all these reports and box every white person you
meet into a ‘racist’ category - given you’ve been exposed to it long enough. It takes a
conscious effort to discard that notion, just as it takes a conscious effort to say ‘Hi’ to
someone.

We are, for some reason, being led to believe that all of this is bad and that it
makes us horrible people - but it doesn’t. There is nothing innately horrible about the
way we are, the way we have evolved to be. We will always look to stuff things into
specific places with other things, even if they don’t belong there 100% because it
gives us comfort and it turns a loose world into one that makes sense. Stereotyping
and prejudice are core of what makes us people, and, unfortunately, they are being
expressly manipulated these days.

If you take away anything from this short intro into a massive topic that could
easily cover a full-on research, take this: there is a reason why subconscious mind is
called that - it’s because it can be entirely dominated by a conscious one. So, if your
subconscious mind is telling you to run away from a black dude because it has
perceived him as a threat, you can consciously shove it back down because you know
it’s a false positive. Don’t ever be afraid of stereotyping and prejudice; humans have
evolved to posses both for a very good reason, and both of them lie in the core of self-
preservation.