Often, without us even realizing it, we are the victims of stereotyping. Stereotyping is generalizing a group of people based on skin color, race, gender, and age, amongst other things. Stereotyping can be as simple as your freshman comp2 teacher asking her 10 o'clock class if they had a part-time job during the summer. However it can be as brutal as a police officer pulling over a car full of Hispanics and asking for immigration papers. Even though stereotyping is frequently unconscious, it is still an unjust categorization of a group of people. For example, when society thinks of illegal immigrants, Hispanics tend to come to mind. Yet America forgets about our northern boarder as if they too cannot be illegal immigrants. Since America has stereotypically put Hispanics as the face of illegal immigration, society continues to only recognize their race as suspects of illegal immigration and it has resulted in a less sympathetic society.
The article "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Game is Actually Happening at Texas School," (2013) does a good job of not categorizing illegal immigrants into one race. In class we discussed whether or not this article was racist, and when it comes to the issue of generalizing illegal immigration, this article is not. The article states that, "Several volunteers wearing "illegal immigrant" labels will be walking around the college campus Wednesday." Even though the game was never carried out, it raised major awareness to the fact that illegal immigrants can be anyone who is not an American citizen or doesn't have the proper paper work proving that they are allowed in this country. However, as the audience reads "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Game is Actually Happening At Texas School," they will notice that the chairmen of the University of Texas YCT chapter is named Lorenzo Garcia. The article never directly attacks Garcia for permitting an illegal immigration hunt to take place because the Huffington post fully understands that the chairmen's Hispanic name is going to make it harder for them to prove that he intend the event to be racist or malicious in anyway.
