GPT

Stereotypes, Power, and the Maintenance of a False Peace

If awful states are understood to be innate and dispositional through and through, then they have no external causes and no one bears any responsibility for them. Injurious sets of ideas gain their power through this essentializing function. They do not merely categorize; they strip events of context and recast harm as nature. If suffering is a personal defect, it cannot be an injury. If, for example, the inhumanity of a categorized subject is understood as an innate quality, then no one has dehumanized them—they are merely being recognized for what they are. Structural violence vanishes into taxonomy.

Stereotyping is often mistaken for an intellectual failing, a kind of cognitive shortcut that produces inaccuracy. But this is misleading. As Susan T. Fiske has argued, stereotyping is not merely an error—it is a form of control, one that both reflects and reinforces power. If those with power define reality, then stereotypes function as ideological technologies that maintain an economy of legitimacy—a distribution of who is considered fully human, partially human, or disposable. This is why stereotypes do not need to be accurate to be effective; their function is not to describe reality, but to manage and justify its current arrangement.

As Walter Lippmann observed in Public Opinion, "systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society." The significance of this statement is profound: we do not merely use stereotypes; we are conditioned by them, shaped through them, and in many cases, dependent on them. They stabilize social positions by offering explanations that reinforce hierarchy, allowing dominant groups to avoid accountability for systemic inequities. These explanations do not arise naturally; they are furnished by institutions that pre-interpret reality for us, preemptively structuring what we can perceive and believe.

Institutional Mediation and the Politics of Perception

Ideology does not present itself as ideology. The narratives that filter into our perception do not arrive as impositions but as self-evident truths. These truths, however, are often manufactured elsewhere, furnished by distant organizations (state apparatuses, corporate media, educational institutions, tech platforms) and then filtered through the networks that structure daily life. The way we come to understand reality is not neutral—it has already been framed.

Stereotypes are embedded within broader ideological infrastructures: the suffering individual is framed not as a subject of oppression but as a dysfunctional unit within an otherwise functional system. The individual must be fixed, not the world.

The unjust arrangement of power must be preserved as natural—inequality must appear not as a failure of the system but as the inevitable result of certain people being what they are.

The Obnoxious Peace: The Role of Stereotypes in Maintaining Order

Stereotypes do not just sustain injustice; they manufacture a sense of order and stability. As Martin Luther King Jr. warned, the greatest threat to justice is not always open violence but the "obnoxious peace"—the maintenance of order through silence, denial, and social policing. Stereotypes play a key role in this process because they allow the status quo to feel legitimate, necessary, and even moral.

This is why those who disrupt these stereotypes—those who expose the contradictions within them—are often perceived as threats, as troublemakers, as disturbers of the peace. Their presence alone suggests that reality could be otherwise—that what is framed as natural is in fact a construction, a decision, a product of power. This disruption generates anxiety, which is often managed through repression and punishment. The stereotype must be defended not because it is true, but because it holds the world in place.

Breaking the Cycle: Alternative Perceptions and Collective Grief

To dismantle this manufactured legitimacy, it is not enough to simply refute stereotypes as falsehoods. The deeper issue is perceptual inertia—the way reality has already been pre-structured, the way certain interpretations feel self-evident. Resistance, then, requires a reorientation of perception, a recognition that the way we see is not neutral.

Bayo Akomolafe suggests that perhaps politics does not begin with debate but with grieving together—an acknowledgment that something has been lost, that something has been hidden from us, that the world could have been different. This stands in stark contrast to the manufactured positivity that dominates neoliberal culture, where grief, rage, and negativity are suppressed in favor of a curated, frictionless existence. As Byung-Chul Han argues, the age of anxiety is an age where profound boredom and deep encounters with the unexpected have been replaced by self-referential sameness—an endless circulation of the already known. In this landscape, grief and rupture are not merely uncomfortable—they are politically dangerous.

The challenge, then, is not only to name the stereotype, to expose it as ideology, but to create alternative ways of sensing, relating, and knowing. To break free of the essentialized narratives that structure perception, we must cultivate a radical openness to complexity.

This, of course, is a difficult task. The convenience of pre-packaged meaning is hard to resist, and the penalties for refusing it are often steep. But the alternative is to remain trapped in a world that is not neutral but has been made to appear that way, a world where harm is mistaken for order and where oppression masquerades as inevitability.

In the end, the question is not whether we will live in a world structured by narratives and perceptions—we inevitably will. The question is: who gets to shape them, and in whose interest?