Humans naturally categorize and bucket clumps to maximize efficiency in storage and processing logic. We see in via terminology such as mathematics such as real, irrational, and imaginary numbers. Though they are terms of definitions, their usage is to make it more efficient to speak about mathematics.
Racism is rightfully heavily criticized in the United States. I want to point out that racism is criticized universally, but stereotypes should be looked at with nuance, which of course is rarely done from either the morally just due to censorship or unjust side. Partly due to politics, there’s censorship of saying certain stereotypes. For example, Asians are good at academics (which most people don’t actually censor because Asians are model minorities), black on black shooting rate is higher than white on white, or black and Latino students on average have poorer academics than white and Asian.
Rather than provide the nuance, I invite the reader to research why each statement could be better understood outside their face values. However, from a solutionist’s perspective, each stereotype is true, and must be addressed at its root cause. It’s frustrating when the opposite hammer solution is used (e.g. Defund the Police, then the realization that there will always be law enforcement in some form at any scale).
People are naturally making groupings to simplify thinking in their brains. As a software engineer, I stereotype code: while reviewing code, I look at coding patterns, and I just know whether the code is designed poorly through pattern matching code I’ve seen before that does good and bad. I extend this thinking of grouping to physical stereotypes. For example, solving political problems, figuring out how one group does so well compared to others, or, if you’re a cop, is someone I pulled over going to shoot me. I think there’s a lot of innocent suburban people who don’t understand the crime rate against cops and what goes on in their head per pullover and vice versa. As younger generations become more progressive and racially integrated, I think American racism has on average improved to simply becoming solely racial stereotyping rather than genuine prejudice. Though making hurtful race-based commentary should be criticized, I think there is heavy dismissal of any discussion of these stereotypes when in reality these stereotypes are created naturally. Additionally, I also don’t think those hurtful commentary will go away; they happen all the time and weave in culturally and subconsciously more often than people think (e.g. the interracial dating scene or passport bros).
Even in a post-race world where everyone has the same skin colors, stereotypes will continue based on your environment (e.g. a software engineer wearing t-shirts, a backpack, and glasses) and your effort (e.g. software engineers not going to the gym. Though I’ve noticed in the 2020s, more are going, yet they still get classified because of the way they dress, and to be fair engineers do dress like “engineers”). You don’t have to look far into the future for a post-race world: in eastern Asian countries, being tanned relegates you to being from a poor background which have inherent class issues. On the flip side, Americans want someone to be tanned because it shows one is rich.
People will naturally create stereotypes or generically categories and groupings to speed up decision-making. This efficiency gain extends to how we classify people, and naturally, if a group of people have certain negative connotations, then there will be some form of negative commentary and actions against those people (see my article on the necessity of DEI).