August Blog!!!

The genetic logical fallacy may seem extraordinarily simple, however, this stereotypical way of expressing ignorant ideologies has shaped hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people’s minds whether they admit it or not. In my own words, a genetic logical fallacy is exaggerating instances that occur less than half of the time and bringing them to life by creating labels and/or generalizations that individuals buy into by word of mouth, and nowadays, social media as well.

For anybody who grew up playing basketball, there is one major stereotype that many people, including myself at one point during adolescence, buy in to. “Black people can jump higher than anyone else.” Are there extremely athletic black people? Yes, there are! Are there extremely athletic Asian, Hispanic, Indian, and white people as well? Of course. Without the intention of tooting my own horn, I realized during high school that if there was anything I was good at it was jumping and I’m just about as white as they come. During my athletic prime in high school my running vertical leap was 39 inches. My running vertical actually got even higher a couple years later and is currently 40 inches. Another identically wrong stereotype is that, “Asians aren’t athletic at all.” I have a buddy who is of Asian ethnic descent and can jump very high as well. Why exactly did we create stereotypes, and how did they originate?

Genetic logical fallacies are an important topic to me and should be important to everyone else because stereotypes have created mass ignorance over the years. Stereotypes originated from labels and labels originated from language. Race was never even a thing until we, the human race, decided to generalize colors in order to rank one another with the goal to separate one another for selfish reasons. This has led to bigotry for hundreds and hundreds of years and continues to do so every day. Take a moment and simply think about this. One ignorant ideology has made an everlasting impression on society and will continue to do so. The reason this problem is nearly impossible to fix is because a growing population mixed with the addition of parents passing down ignorant ideas to the young and absorbing generations at a time in their lives when they are the most vulnerable and believe just about anything their parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, etc… tell them.

Stereotypes have played an astronomical role throughout history and especially current history as our knowledge as members of the human race has expanded. About half of Americans despise Donald Trump because of his ignorant comments which recently led to an even greater separation among ignorant people. Hate crimes have taken place constantly, although only a minute percentage of them make the news. Humans have been murdered over ignorance; even worse when you break it down, for centuries humans have been killed because of a biological pigmentation in skin. Why were kids never taught this in 6^th grade biology? Why was factoring a trinomial more important than confronting bigotry. Is it because it’s a sensitive topic, or is it because from the beginning of lower education we have focused on more pointless matters than important ones?