Objectives of the Study

The second study is about stereotypes. For this part, the writer takes Dan Caldwell’s writing “The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California” who gives brief explanation about stereotypes. The latent prejudice of early Californians was nurtured by the use of popular stereotypes. Defining stereotypes as pictures in our heads, Walter Lippman first introduced the concept of the stereotype to social science in 1922. He went on to point out that the stereotype is an undifferentiated caricature of the group or individual it presumably represents and that prejudiced people see mainly what they expect to see rather than what is really there. In regard to the Chinese, early Californians were no exception to this rule Caldwell, 1971:123. Caldwell showed that stereotypes are actually only “pictures in our head” and people see “what they expect to see” rather than “what is really there.” Therefore, it means that stereotypes are based only on someone or some group’s perspective and expectation toward a certain group of people that are, at most times, not true. This is usually because stereotypes toward certain groups are one-sided. Caldwell also noted this in the next part Often stereotypes disregard fact and concern only image .The most common stereotypes refer to physical characteristics or to out of the ordinary lifestyles. The most common physical characteristics include skin color and features of the head: hair, eyes, nose, mouth and shape of the head. Stereotypes referring to lifestyles often attribute decadent and immoral behavior to the group that does not conform to the majority Caldwell, 1971:123. As noted, common stereotypes deal with physical characteristics like skin color and features of the head. People usually start from physical points and make some mistaken beliefs toward it. For example, people with Black skin are more resistant to heat, a stereotype toward Afro-Americans that led them to become workers in cotton plantations during the era of slavery. Whether this stereotype is true or not, nobody knows because no one has attempted a research on it. They simply agree to believe it and thus made the stereotypes look true. Other stereotypes lead to lifestyles. Usually, these kinds of stereotypes disregard a group of people to have “immoral and decadent” behaviors although, same as physical stereotypes, are not always true. For example, a common stereotype that an Afro-American family usually consists of a poor single parent with the kids not knowing hisher father and live in dirty places. Of course, this is not true as the majority of Afro- American families have complete families nowadays. Perhaps this stereotype was true in the past when they still lived in the ghetto and had difficulty in finding a stable job, which led to poverty. However, this is not true nowadays as the majority of Afro-Americans have stable jobs and some of them are even richer than White people. The stereotypes still exist due to some people’s unwillingness to see the reality and still cling to their false-point of view from the past. In conclusion, these two kinds of stereotypes continue even until now because people refuse to see the thing as it is, and cling to what they think about it instead. The third study is the studies about identity. How can this kind of problem happen? Why does this problem occur? Actually, the ones who experience these kinds of problems are not first-generation Chinese immigrants because they understand their identity as a certain race, which is Chinese. Identity becomes a problem for the second generations of Chinese-American who were born in America. Based on the American principal of ius soli nationality by birth, they are clearly American. This principle makes those Chinese-Americans question why they cannot be identified as “American” and are still perceived as Chinese instead, as most of them were born in America. Jing Yi Song’s book “Fighting for Chinese American Identity” gives a brief background about this