With A Grateful Heart by Chris Gil

What if everything you believed about a person; or even a whole group of people, was only half the story?

Reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists made me reflect on times when I might have been judgmental, or when my own ideas about a specific group of people or individuals were unconsciously shaped by preconceptions and mental representations. Even though we may embrace egalitarian and non-prejudiced values, some stereotypes are so deeply integrated into our subconscious that their activation feels automatic and inevitable. To hold them back often requires conscious effort and time.

It is also interesting to note that stereotypes have historically worked as shortcuts, a quick way for people to categorize information and make predictions about others with very limited knowledge. The problem is that in today’s highly interconnected, multicultural, and rapidly changing world, these shortcuts no longer serve us well. Instead, they create distortions, reinforce bias, and contribute to social categorization and injustice. For example, the stereotype that French people are romantic, fashionable, arrogant, or have poor hygiene, accurate or not, shows how our minds categorize information to make quick predictions about them, especially in social situations.

This brings me back to Adichie’s insights. What struck me most is how she highlights that stereotypes are not necessarily untrue, but they represent only a single part of a much larger story. Because of that, the story remains incomplete, and stereotypes force that fragment to become the only story.

So maybe the more useful reflective question for us is not whether stereotypes are useful at all in today’s society, but in what ways they might still be useful without causing harm.

If you’re interested in exploring these ideas further, I highly recommend reading We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.