No Stupid Questions

America is a nation of immigrants and mixed cultures. In the early 1900s, there was great pressure to acculturate to the "American" way of doing things. Immigrants changed their names, clothes, foods, and language to match the "mainstream." There was a push to build a "colorblind" society.

By the 1960s-70s, younger people began to realize that "acculturation" really meant erasing cultural heritage and acquiescing to white, Anglo, male-dominated culture. So there was a movement to preserve, celebrate, and empower differences between people.

This gave rise to the Black Power movement, creation of the term "Hispanic" and the Latin American ethnicity, Women's Lib, Gay Pride, and even the rise of pizza delivery chains (which was regarded as a somewhat exotic ethnic food at the time).

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

This is such a white person post, man

Our brains are masterful at categorizing information and externalizing information for efficiency (i.e. wow your car smells like my babysitter’s car from when I was 4—that's weird, she drove us to the beach and we rode in rowboats in the pond and fed ducks that day).

If you want actual scientific discourse on this, I implore you to look into social psychology, which presents this in a brilliant little pipeline.

Stereotypes emerge from a "kernel of truth"—which may be false, socially constructed, or only true in a narrow context. When generalized, they become prejudice (pre-judging), which leads to discrimination. When embedded in systems, this discrimination reinforces racism, sexism, and other structural inequalities.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Importantly, this is not just a U.S. issue—it’s a human issue. Our brains naturally categorize to conserve cognitive resources, making this tendency easy to exploit without proper education. And it is exploited—everywhere. From the gendered pricing of products like women’s razors to the way news stories frame subjects based on race or class, these biases shape perception and reinforce systemic inequalities across societies.

A mix of cognitive bias and systemic racism

But also stereotypes exists and can be true to some degree, often just cultural

Active Divide and Rule.

Last thing the government need is people using social media to realise we have more in common than differences, which social media naturally does.

So it’s managed.