[pizzafeelsright]

What is wrong with stereotypes?

Snakes are, at times, quite dangerous. Granted, not all snakes, but in terms of being risk-averse, and unaware of which snakes are quite possibly deadly, am I not, at least in my current ignorant state, best served to avoid all snakes?

Feel free to substitute "snakes" with any existing stereotype. I personally am a fan of "people who eat pizza with pineapple".

[chefandy]

There's a whole lot of information out there about the harm caused by stereotypes. Normally I tell people to look it up because it's not hard and I'm not your research assistant, but here's a freebie: "Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal" is a mid-aughts study in which the authors sent out 5k job applications using fabricated equally-weighted resumes that were randomly assigned a stereotypically Black American or stereotypically white American name. Resumes attached to 'white' sounding names were fifty percent more likely to recieve a callback. Would you consider that a reasonable pan-industry attempt by employers to protect themselves from harm based entirely on someone's name?

[joshuahedlund]

Your mistake is you're only thinking about it from the perspective of the stereotyper. Now think about the negative impact (career, legal system, etc) on the person being incorrectly stereotyped.

[lawlessone]

Bad faith actor