Racism, Sexism and Ageism: The Impact of Stereotype Thinking

For example, Smith and associates define 'racism' as the belief that a particular racial group is inferior to another and that a person's social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn racially-related biological characteristics. Sexism, according to Lun and colleagues (2007) is cognitively the same view except that the inferiority/superiority dimension is viewed in terms of gender. The same way of thinking is true for ageism, except that in this regard the 'inferior characteristics' are associated with membership in a certain age group (Nelson, 2004). As can be seen from their definition, all three of these sociopolitical views represent stereotypic thinking.

When people engage in stereotypic thinking, Hinton (2000) reports that they are engaging in unchanging, rigid, overly categorical, and undifferentiated thought. This kind of thinking is typically inaccurate because individual variation is not taken into account. This paper examines the impact of Racism, Sexism, and Ageism on the development of the culturally diverse person.

Impact of Stereotypic Thinking: The S

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dwards, 2006, p. 31) Sexism According to Witten (2007), America is a structurally sexist society built on a number of patriarchal assumptions that make for male control over women as well as over the family as a cultural institution. Sexism, Witten states, extends through all relationships, as well as in the cultural and sociopolitical institutions of capitalism, education, healthcare, criminal justice, and welfare. He states that the impact of this has been to subjugate, to silence, to trivialize, to exploit, and to intimidate and oppress. As with racism, sexism can also be of strong impact on the development of children in general and the culturally diverse individual in particular. In this regard, Diemer and associates (2006) note that sexism can create the same internalized sense of oppression, as does racism. However, the authors point out that, be it racism or sexism, if children are taught to challenge these stereotypes when attempted to believe them or when confronted by them in others, it can be cognitively helpful. Moreover, they discovered that students who did challenge these views received good support for their stance from both other students and school authorities. In other words, the negative eff
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Approximate Word count = 1810
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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