This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes

This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes — page 7 — When Walter Lippmann created this new definition of stereotype he wasn't talking about race But it didn't take long for his word to catch on After all people were struggling against this sort of categorization in countries around the world In the United States women gained the right to vote in 1920 but through a tricky list of taxes and tests the Southern states managed to keep black women from casting ballots Around the same time Mahatma Gandhi was protesting British rule in India and trying to end centuries of discrimination there Canada was busy banning Chinese immigration and severely limiting Japanese immigration And something even worse was brewing in Europe ELECTION RACE TOO CLOSE TO CALL

This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes — page 8 — Eugenics Gets Ugly From the 1890s to the mid 1900s people all over the world toyed with the idea of creating stronger humans controlling which people had kids and encouraging a master race This was before there were even words to talk about stereotypes But some scientists professors and politicians were hard at work creating them Wilhelm Schallmayer Germany 1891 He thought that by treating sick and weak people doctors were leading to the downfall of civilization It would be better to help the strong and let the others wither away Georges Vacher de Lapouge France 1899 This guy believed tall strong white people were best and dark skinned Mediterranean types weren't so smart He suggested keeping them separate so the world would have high class leaders and lower class workers He spoke six languages so he could explain this in English German Charles and Gertrude Davenport United States 1910 These super rich Americans said upper class white people should have many children Lower class people especially immigrants should have none They even suggested operating on unfit mothers to make sure they couldn't have kids Alfred Ploetz Germany 1933 Alfred thought the government should decide which parents were strong and healthy enough to have kids And he believed Adolf Hitler was exactly the leader to put his ideas into action

This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes — page 9 — There were more than nine million Jewish people in Europe in 1933 when Hitler took power By the time World War II ended in 1945 the Nazis had murdered more than six million Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party took power in Germany in 1933. Influenced by many researchers and writers of the time Hitler decided to create a master race The world would be led by tall strong blue eyed Aryans At the very bottom of the race hierarchy would be Jewish people The Nazis began by excluding Jewish people from society banning them from owning land for example They then isolated them in a system of more than 40 000 ghettos detention sites and prisons Finally they started systematically killing Jewish people in extermination camps and gas chambers Jewish people weren't the only group targeted by Hitler's Nazis About 200 000 Roma people then known as gypsies were killed along with communists homosexuals Jehovah's Witnesses and hundreds of thousands of those with mental and physical disabilities Hitler tried to create a world based on stereotyping prejudice and discrimination in their most extreme forms

This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes — page 10 — Glass Houses In the 1930s researchers at Princeton University in the United States asked students to match ten ethnic groups with traits that described them Here are some of the results 79 percent of students thought Jewish people were shrewd 78 percent thought Germans were scientific minded 75 percent thought black people were lazy 54 percent thought Turks were cruel Obviously Germans weren't the only ones holding biased views based on race and ethnicity Stereotypes were flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic

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