Stereotypes and stereotyping: A moral analysis

Philosophical Papers

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 251-289

  Blum, Lawrence ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON   (United States)

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EID: 59849121522     PISSN: 05568641     EISSN: 19968523     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/05568640409485143     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Stereotypes do not exhaust objectionable cultural imagery of groups. Some images of groups are simply demeaning without attributing specific characteristics to the groups. For example, American popular culture has, especially in the past, utilized images of Asians with buck teeth, speaking a kind of pidgin English [the Chinese character played by Mickey Rooney in the film Breakfast at Tiffany's is an example], or Blacks with huge lips and bugeyes, which makes them the butt of humor. The images depict the group in a demeaning and insulting manner (and generally, though not always, intend to do so), but they are distinct from stereotypes. They do not particularly attempt to associate the group in question with a general trait meant to apply to the members of the group. They are more like the visual, or representational, equivalent of an ethnic slur, an insulting name for a group (like kike, spic, nigger, Polack, fag). Sometimes the word ‘stereotype’ is used broadly to refer to any objectionable image of a group; but stereotypes in the sense I am referring to in this paper operate by a particular logic of attribution of characteristics to group members that does not apply to visual slurs.
2. I am taking groups as the target of stereotypes. In ordinary parlance, the targets are a broader range of entities. Individual entities, for example, can be said to be stereotyped, meaning that in the public mind certain general characteristics are generally attributed to the entity in question (A recent New York Times article is entitled, ‘Boston Rises Above Unflattering Stereotypes’ July 25, 2004, by Pam Belluck.), in a manner analogous to such attributions of groups. Moral issues about stereotyping do not apply in exactly the same way to groups, especially salient social groups, as to individuals; for example, the way stereotypes about groups bear on views and treatment of individuals within the group have no precise analogy in the case of individuals.
3. A sophisticated, recent account of the individual pathology approach is Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1996).
4. To elaborate just a bit:I think the individual pathology approach is much more plausible with regard to prejudice than stereotyping. The two are closely linked in popular thinking, and the psychological study of stereotypes is meant to, and does, contribute to an understanding of prejudice (and vice versa). The link is evident. People who are prejudiced against a group generally hold negative stereotypes of that group. Nevertheless, stereotyping is not the same as prejudice, and neither requires the other. Prejudice involves a negative affect toward a group and a disposition to disvalue it and its members. Stereotyping does not always involve prejudice in this sense. For example, Jones might stereotype Asians as good at math; such a view does not characteristically support a negative feeling toward Asians (although it may—for example, resentment at their success). More generally, even holding a negative stereotype of group X does not always prompt negative affect toward group X. Someone might regard Poles as stupid (cf. Helmreich, The Things They Say Behind Your Back, 166–171), or Asians as bad drivers, yet not feel negatively toward those groups. Moreover, even if a stereotype is negatively evaluatively charged, for a particular carrier of that stereotype, this charge need not always trigger the corresponding negative affect. Stereotyping is, I believe, much more common than prejudice, and the latter seems to me more amenable to an explanation in terms of individual pathology than the former, although of course there are widely shared and culturally transmitted prejudices, just as there are cultural stereotypes; so individual psychology can never constitute the full explanation of why people in a given society hold the prejudices they do. Even less can it explain stereotypes.
5. Stangor and Schaller refer to a tradition in the psychological study of stereotypes in which it is assumed that ‘stereotypes are learned, and potentially changed, primarily through the information that individuals acquire through direct contact with members of other social groups.’ Charles Stangor and Mark Schaller, ‘Stereotypes as Individual and Collective Representations,’ in Stangor (ed.), Stereotypes and Prejudice Philadelphia, Penn.:Psychology Press, 2000), 66. See also David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford:Blackwell's, 1993), 126.
6. Walter Lippmann, from Public Opinion (New York:Free Press, 1997 [1922]), 54–55
7. However, some commentators use ‘stereotype’ in a way that does not require the generalization involved in the stereotype to be false or misleading. For example, P. Oakes, S. A. Haslam, and J.C. Turner, in Stereotyping and Social Reality (Oxford:Blackwell's, 1994), say ‘Stereotyping is the process of ascribing characteristics to people on the basis of their group memberships’ (1); Stangor, ‘Volume Overview,’ in Stangor:‘Stereotypes are beliefs about the characteristics of groups of individuals’ (1). I am not claiming that such an account is flatly false, but only that my own account of stereotypes as necessarily false or misleading makes it easier to draw a clear distinction between false/unwarranted and true/warranted generalizations about groups, a distinction with both epistemic and moral import. It should be noted that one impetus behind some of the definitions just mentioned is a view that emphasizes the similarity or continuity between the mental processes involved in stereotyping and those involved in the more basic mental operation of categorization. This issue is discussed below, note 18.
8. Frederick Schauer discusses this point. Suppose that by some measure, it were determined that 60% of humans are honest and, further, that 60% of Swedes are also honest. It would then, Schauer points out, be misleading to say ‘Swedes are honest.’ ‘A key feature of a sound generalization is its comparative dimension.’ (Frederick Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes [Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap/Harvard, 2003], 1 If). I don't think Schauer means to deny that specialized contexts could render such generalizations meaningful without being implicitly comparative to a norm. For example, if someone questioned whether Swedes were honest, a finding that 60% of them were honest would be meaningful, even if that was the norm for all human beings.
9. William Helmreich supports this particular account of the Irish/alcoholism stereotype with several studies plausibly regarded as backing up the generalization that there is greater alcoholism among Irish people than other groups—a 1947 study that showed hospital admission for ‘alcohol psychosis’ to be three to eight times greater for people of Irish descent than for five other American ethnic groups, a study in the 1960's finding Irish-Americans to be most likely of all studied ethnic groups to report drinking at least twice a week. (Helmreich, The Things They Say Behind Your Back:Stereotypes and the Myths Behind Them [New Brunswick, N.J.:Transaction Publishers, 1984], 143f).
10. Although valid generalizations are very different from stereotypes (or so I am arguing), valid group generalizations present normative ‘appropriate use’ issues in their own right. Some of these issues bear some resemblance to problems with stereotypes. For example, Latinos/Hispanics have the largest school drop-out rate of any major ethnoracial group in the United States. (See discussion of several studies to this effect, but with significantly different rates, in Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses:Closing the Racial Gap in Learning [New York:Simon and Schuster, 2003], 106–08.) But this does not make it appropriate for a teacher of a given Latino student to treat that student as if he were likely to drop out. On the other hand, it might make it appropriate for the teacher to be especially sensitive to signs that a Latino student is having trouble in school, and to intervene earlier than she would with respect to a student from a less at-risk group—for example, to probe the student's home and personal situation to see what she might do to make his dropping out less likely. The ethical and epistemological issues involved in the deploying of valid generalizations in relation to individual members of the groups in question is sometimes confused with the issue of the way that stereotypes distort treatment of individuals [see below, pp. ??]. They are different but related issues. Schauer compellingly argues that the fear of stereotyping has led to an inappropriate suspicion of all generalizations. He argues persuasively throughout his book that it is often rational and appropriate to base policies concerning groups on valid generalizations about those groups, even though one knows that this will result in some individual members of the group being treated in a manner at odds with their individual characteristics. (For example, it is rational to have a policy of requiring pilots to retire at age 60, based on a valid generalization about the correlation between age and piloting skills, even though some former pilots who are over 60 would be as good pilots as those who are allowed in (i.e. under 60) by the policy. Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes, Chapter 4.). Although Schauer successfully argues that generalizations are essential to any serious social policy, he does not sufficiently differentiate generalizations from stereotypes.
11. Lawrence Bobo suggests that, historically, stereotypes of Blacks by Whites in the U.S. did tend to take a categorical form, implying something like a universal generalization—all Blacks are this or that—but that contemporary stereotypes of Blacks are not as broad in scope (Lawrence Bobo, ‘Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century,’ in N. Smelser, W.J. Wilson, and F. Mitchell (eds.), America Becoming:Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vol 1 [Washington, D.C.:National Academy Press, 2001, 275f). The older, more categorical, conception of stereotypes lives on in the idea that stereotypes have disappeared because they currently seldom take the form of explicitly targeting every member of a group.
12. A different possible basis for the ‘kernel of truth’ idea is that there is an historical explanation for the link between the target group and the target characteristic in the stereotype. Often stereotypes do have historical explanations, but the explanations frequently do not bear on any current empirical truth to the stereotype. Stereotypes of Black inferiority were generated to rationalize slavery and segregation. This explanation provides no support for the stereotype. Even when the explanation bears on current realities—for example, Jews developed commercial enterprises and traditions because they were forbidden from many other occupations—the truth in the explanation is, as in the ‘comparative generalization’ case, too distant from what is implied in the stereotype to say that the former is a kernel of truth in the latter.
13. Michael Pickering, Stereotyping:The Politics of Representation (New York:Palgrave, 2001), 9.
14. Examples of accounts of stereotyping that emphasize their fixity or rigidity are, for example, ‘Whether favorable or unfavorable, a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a category…[I]t is rather a fixed idea that accompanies a category’ (Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, [Reading, MA:Addison-Wesley, 1958], 191). ‘A stereotype is an unvarying form or pattern, fixed or conventional expression, notion, character, mental pattern, etc., having no individuality, as though cast from a mold.’ (Larry May, The Morality of Groups:Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights [Notre Dame, Ind.:Notre Dame Press, 1987], 136, citing Webster's dictionary).' ‘A stereotype is an exaggerated belief, oversimplification, or uncritical judgment about a category.’ (Helmreich, The Things They Say, 2)
15. This evidence-resistance is only a tendency on the part of the stereotyper. Sometimes a stereotyper is able to ‘take in’ evidence against a stereotype that he holds, in a way that causes him to question or even abandon the stereotype. But this scenario obtains much less frequently than it does of a mere false belief held in a non-stereotypic, non-rigid, manner.
16. W. E. Jones, ‘Indignation, Immodesty, and Immoral Believing,’ (unpublished manuscript) defends the view that false beliefs about others can constitute a form of misrelationship to them. Such an argument could be construed as implying a broader one—that any form of cognitive investment in a proposition can constitute a form of misrelationship to other persons. This would, then, include stereotyping, which (as I argue below) requires a level or form of cognitive investment that need not rise to the level of belief.
17. The line between holding a false generalization in a stereotypic as contrasted with a non-stereotypical fashion is, however, a blurry rather than a sharp one.
18. Clearly distinguishing stereotypic and non-stereotypic holdings of generalizations runs contrary to a strand in current thinking about stereotypes, which sees stereotyping as a normal and inevitable cognitive process. For example, ‘As perceivers, we employ categories to help impose order and meaning on the steady stream of social stimuli impinging upon us at any given moment. It is both necessary and natural for us to do so. However, once social categories exist, and given a principle of efficiency…it is likely that we exaggerate the degree of between-group difference and underestimate the degree of within-group variation.’ (Lawrence Bobo and Michael Massagli, ‘Stereotyping and Urban Inequality,’ in A. O'Connor, C. Tilly, and L. Bobo [eds.], Urban Inequality:Evidence from Four Cities [New York:Russell Sage, 2001], 94.). ‘Stereotypes and prejudice are the result of social categorization. Social categorization occurs when, rather than thinking about another person as a unique individual, we instead think of the person as a member of a group of people, for instance, on the basis of their physical characteristics…or other types of categories (as an alcoholic, a policeman, or a schizophrenic).’ (Stangor, ‘Volume Overview,’ in Stangor (ed.), Stereotypes and Prejudice, 2). ‘A long tradition has conceived of stereotyping as an automatic and inevitable consequence of categorization.’ (Loretta Lepore and Rupert Brown, ‘Category and Stereotype Activation:Is Prejudice Inevitable?’ in Stangor, Stereotypes and Prejudice, 119). It is true that some of the cognitive distortions involved in stereotyping are also involved in ordinary categorization—selective attention and memory, expectations of individual members of the categorized group that do not hold of all members, a tendency to exaggerate in-category similarity and out-category difference, and the like. And it is also true that intellectual laziness unrelated to specific stereotyping can serve to keep existing stereotypes in place in individuals' minds, and that any use of general categories runs a risk of rigidifying those categories. Nevertheless there is an important qualitative difference between the mere use of a social group category and the stereotyping of that category, which the definitions above blur; even assuming that categories necessarily entail generalizations about those categories (relating to their criteria of application), there is still an important difference between a true and a false (and warranted and unwarranted) generalization, and between a generalization cognized in an open manner and one cognized in a rigid and closed manner. I have suggested that ‘stereotype’ be confined to the latter, problematic, forms of generalizing.
19. Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines analyze a 1991 survey that finds that 52% of Whites are willing to characterize Blacks as ‘aggressive or violent,’ 42% ‘complaining,’ and 34% ‘lazy.’ Sniderman and Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1997), 61–63. By ‘willing to characterize,’ they mean that the respondent scores six or higher on a ten-point scale in which ten is a ‘very good’ description (of Blacks) and zero a ‘very inaccurate.’ It is worth noting here that the instructions to the (White) subjects asks how well the subjects think that an adjective presented to them (‘aggressive,’ ‘lazy’) ‘describes Blacks as a group’ and is ‘a description of most Blacks,’ and includes the qualification, ‘Of course, no word fits absolutely everybody [in a group].’ The conception of stereotypes used by these researchers is quite distinct from the older, categorical conception in which stereotypes involve a definitively universal generalization about a group. See above, note 11.
20. Diana T. Meyers, Subjection and Subjectivity:Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy (New York:Routledge, 1994), 53.
21. Black people often report this sort of behavior. See, for example, David Shipler, who interviewed scores of Blacks and Whites:‘White women clutch their purses, cross the street, choose another elevator.’ A Country of Strangers:Blacks and Whites in America (New York:Vintage, 1997), 357.
22. Patricia Devine and Andrew Elliott, ‘Are Racial Stereotypes Really Fading? The Princeton Trilogy Revisited,’ in Stangor (ed.), Stereotypes and Prejudice [originally 1995]; P.G. Devine, ‘Stereotypes and Prejudice:Their automatic and controlled components,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 1989:5–18.
23. Results from our stereotype assessment suggest that [in the U.S.] there is a clear, consistent contemporary stereotype of Blacks and that this stereotype is highly negative in nature.’ Devine and Elliott, ‘Racial Stereotypes,’ 95. Devine and Elliott appear to use the singular in relation to stereotypes (‘a stereotype of Blacks’), meaning that a particular group in question is subject to distinct cultural stereotypes. By contrast, I use ‘stereotype’ to refer to an association between a particular trait and a group in question, so that if Blacks are stereotyped as aggressive and lazy and complaining [see above, note 19], I say that there are three stereotypes, while Devine and Elliott would speak of that in the singular as ‘a stereotype.
24. For example, in one of the first, and still important and widely-cited, studies of stereotypes, in 1933, Katz and Braly found ‘superstitious’ to be the most common stereotypical attribute of Blacks; but more recent studies find that characteristic to be absent. (Devine's own study from 1995 puts ‘athletic’ as the most-cited attribute [Devine and Elliot, ‘Racial Stereotypes,’ 91]; this trait was not cited at all in the Katz and Braly study.) See discussion of Devine and the Katz-Braly study in Lepore and Brown, ‘Category and Stereotype Activation,’ 124.
25. Stephen Carter, ‘The Black Table, the Empty Seat, and the Tie,’ in Gerald Early (ed.), Lure and Loathing:Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York:Penguin, 1993). Carter describes the situation in the following way:‘Let me begin with an uneasy truth:I scare people…I watch with mixed feelings the stream of fellow business travelers, the white ones, anyway, treating the seat next to me as though it is already occupied. Of white women this is particularly true:to sit next to a black man, even a well-attired one, is a choice to be made only when no other seat is available, and even then to be avoided if possible, occasionally by standing.’ (58f.) It should be noted that the avoidance behavior Carter notes might stem from sources other than stereotype-based fear. A white (or other non-Black) might just be uncomfortable with Blacks without necessarily being afraid of them, or even of holding any particular stereotypes of Blacks. (See Lawrence Blum, ‘I'm Not a Racist, But…’:The Moral Quandary of Race [Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 2002], 66–69, on the distinction between racial discomfort and the racial aversion that accompanies negative stereotyping.) Nevertheless, one must credit Carter's sense of what is going on in his own experience of the situation he describes.
26. Nevertheless, Devine does to some extent muddy the waters on the issue of cognitive investment and responsibility for stereotypic associations by implying that the automatic triggering of stereotypic responses is to be equated with mere awareness of the existence of the stereotype in the culture, that is, awareness that others make that association, even if one does not do so oneself. For example, she (and Elliott) criticize the Katz and Braly study [see note 24] for conflating, in the experimenters' instructions to subjects, personal belief in a stereotype with knowledge of its existence in the culture, thus confusing the subjects about what they were being asked to report—their own personal beliefs, or their knowledge of the existence of the stereotype. However, Devine and Elliott treat knowledge of the existence of the stereotype as if it were equivalent to the stereotypic attribute being triggered, or activated, in the subject's mind when presented with a prompt of the group in question. These seem importantly distinct phenomena from a moral point of view. Someone could be aware of the existence of a stereotype in her own society without in any way being ‘subject to it,’ that is, without the presence of the target group triggering the association with the stereotypic characteristic. Devine may believe that, empirically, the former never exists without the latter; if someone is aware of the stereotype, she always automatically associates the stereotype trait with the stereotyped group. Perhaps she is correct about this, but it does not seem plausible to me. Could not someone work so hard to counter a particular stereotype that she entirely stops associating the group with the stereotypic characteristic, while remaining fully aware that others in her society do make that association? Perhaps such a case is rare, given the power of cultural stereotypes; but it does not seem impossible. In any case, Devine tends to treat automatic triggering as the same as (not merely as always accompanying) knowing the existence of the stereotype. They are certainly not the same phenomenon, and the former involves a degree (albeit a minor one) of cognitive investment that the latter lacks entirely.
27. Note that it is possible to fail to accord appropriate acknowledgment of individuality, and to do so in a manner connected with the group identity of the person in question, yet without stereotyping the person or group. For example, Mary may have a non-stereotyped view of the Japanese, appreciating the internal complexity of the Japanese as a group. Nevertheless, in her interactions with Noriko, a Japanese acquaintance, Mary constantly makes reference to Noriko's being Japanese, giving too little weight to the many other aspects of Noriko's identity (as woman, lawyer, daughter, political aspirant, and so on), so that Noriko feels that Mary does not see her as an individual. Giving undue weight to someone's group identity is not the same as, and does not require, stereotyping the group; but both involve failing to acknowledge individuality. Christine Sleeter describes an interesting variation on the phenomenon of group consciousness masking others' individuality. She is a white American who traveled to Japan thirty years previously. She had never been to Asia before and apparently had also had little experience with Asian Americans. ‘I recall that when I stepped out of the airplane in Tokyo International Airport, I had a vivid impression that the airport was filled with people who looked exactly alike,’ Sleeter says. (‘Foreword’ to Stacey Lee, Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype:Listening to Asian American Youth [New York:Teachers College Press, 1996], vii.) It would, I think, be misleading to call what is going on here ‘stereotyping,’ because it is not so much that Sleeter wrongly attributed certain characteristics to Japanese people as that she simply failed to see the features regarding which they differed. But the latter does involve a typical effect of stereotyping, namely individuality masking.
28. Although this example is of ethnic diversity within a racial or panethnic group, there are many other kinds of diversity masked by stereotypes. I earlier mentioned diversity of traits (generosity/cheapness), but there is also diversity of socio-economic status, political beliefs, life styles, tastes, age, and so on.
29. See Lee, Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype.
30. When the stereotyper is herself a member of the target group, the act of stereotyping implies a distancing of herself from her own group.
31. In her research on Asian American youth, Lee reports a distinct group (which she calls ‘new wave’ Asian Americans) who ‘feared that the model minority stereotype contributed to the image that Asians are nerds.’ (Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype, 117).
32. Pickering, Stereotypes, 13. Pickering is actually discussing the Sambo image in the British context, but his description suits the American one as well.
33. There are occasional sympathetic Jewish characters in The Passion (almost entirely in the second half of the film) emerging from the crowd following Jesus on the way to his crucifixion to extend kindness or help to him.
34. There are some sympathetic Roman characters in The Passion—Pilate's wife, who suspects that Jesus is an authentic savior, a soldier who eschews the brutality and is kind to Jesus.
35. U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops, review of ‘The Passion of the Christ’ at Film and Broadcasting website:http://www.usccb.org/movies/p/thepassionofthechrist.htm.
36. Robert Wistrich, Anti-Semitism:The Longest Hatred (New York:Schocken, 1991).
37. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Bible, the Jews, and the Death of Jesus:A collection of Catholic Documents, 75, 76, 77. The Bishops' review of the film, cited in note 35, fails to take note of the film's violation of the Church's own strictures as set out here.
38. Bobo and Massagli, ‘Stereotyping and Urban Inequality,’ 97.
39. Bobo provides support for this supposition, in ‘Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century,’ in Smelser et al (eds.), America Becoming, 278. Bobo notes the change in the form of this stereotype in the past five decades, from an innatist to a culturalist understanding of why, in the mind of Whites, Blacks are ‘less intelligent.’
40. Claude Steele, ‘Stereotype Threat and African-American Student Achievement.’ in Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III, Young, Gifted, and Black (Boston, MA:Beacon Press, 2003):109–130. See also Steele and Joshua Aronson, ‘Stereotype Threat and the Test Performance of Academically Successful African Americans,’ in Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (eds.), The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington, D.C.:Brookings Institution, 1998):401–427.
41. Research on stereotypes and prejudice suggests, for example, that Black Americans share many of the same stereotypes of their own group than non-Blacks do, although Blacks are more likely than Whites to affirm positive attributes of their group along with the stereotypical negative ones. [Check reference:? Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race [Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1993.]
42. Steele, ‘Stereotype Threat,’ 116f.
43. As far as I know, Steele does not further discuss the significance of the distinction between a standing, background awareness and a situationally-activated awareness. But it is suggestive of an important line of inquiry concerning the harm of stereotyping. For example, perhaps not everyone who is aware of the existence of a negative stereotype of her group is subject to stereotype threat. Perhaps some people are so confident in their own ability to achieve, or to perform in the manner that the stereotype calls into question, and are so deeply convinced of the falsity of the implied view of their group, that they do not experience anxiety about confirming it. Perhaps this suggests that, while those who are vulnerable to stereotype threat have not necessarily internalized the stereotype, they may well remain in some way beholden to or cognitively invested in it. With respect to ‘Black intellectual inferiority’ stereotypes, Lani Guinier suggests that second generation Black immigrants (from Africa or the Caribbean) may not be vulnerable to stereotype threat, although they may be perfectly aware of its existence. (L. Guinier, ‘Our Preference for the Privileged,’ Boston Globe, July 9, 2004, A13.)
44. Steele's data is confined to experimental situations. Massey et al, The Source of the River:The Social Origins of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2003) finds some evidence that college students' levels of actual achievement in college is affected by stereotype threat as Steele understands that concept. Cited in Larry L. Rowley, ‘Dissecting the Anatomy of African-American Inequality:The Impact of Racial Stigma an Social Origins on Group Status and College Achievement,’ in Educational Researcher, vol. 33, #4, May 2004, 19.
45. An example of a further dimension of the moral assessment of stereotypes beyond the scope of this paper bears on the assessment of specific, individual manifestations of a cultural stereotype—such as a filmic portrayal or a picture in a textbook, meant to indicate something general about a group. For example, when Halle Berry, an African American, won an Academy Award in 2001 for her performance in Monster's Ball, some people felt that her portrayal was stereotypic in the sense that her character was oversexualized and hysterical, a stereotypic image of Black women familiar in American popular culture and thought. However, it is possible to accept such a characterization while also believing that Berry's character was a richly complex and human one, not at all one dimensional. So it would be stereotypical in the sense of exemplifying a cultural stereotype; but it would not be as objectionable as a one-dimensional portrayal that conformed to the same stereotype. (Some might say that, in the former case, there was no stereotype at all, that two-dimensionality renders a portrayal non-stereotypical, even if the character possesses traits corresponding to a cultural stereotype. I am not taking a stand on this semantic issue, but only noting the moral difference between the two types of portrayals.) A further variable in the assessment of individual stereotypical portrayals or images is whether that portrayal exists in the context of several other portrayals or images of the target group in question, and whether the range of portrayals associates the group in question with several non-stereotypic attributes. For example, if a film has one Black female character who is hypersexualized but several other Black female characters who are not, then the former may be, for that reason, less objectionable, since the larger context taken as a whole does not portray Black females in a stereotypic fashion. (Again, some might take this one step further and say that the one portrayal of the Black female as hypersexualized is not stereotypic, precisely on the grounds that Black females as a whole are not so portrayed.)