Traumatic memory causes stereotyping
Everybody
potentially has trauma. By the various stories of life and different
backgrounds, people can be haunted by trauma. Traumatic memories are relived,
with all of the attendant feelings, rather than remembered. Attendant feelings
usually lead human perceptions. The perceptions can be translated to a good
perceptions or bad perceptions. Stereotyping is one of the bad perceptions’
examples. In City of Fire by Robert
Ellis, the main character considered experiencing the emotional thought
impacted by traumatic memory that caused a stereotyping statement. Trauma resulted stereotyping.
Trauma has
sometimes been defined in reference to circumstances that are outside the realm
of normal human experience. The word “trauma” is used to describe experiences
or situations that are emotionally painful and distressing, and that overwhelm
people’s ability to cope, leaving them powerless. Unfortunately, this
definition doesn’t always hold true. For some groups of people, trauma can
occur frequently and become part of the common human experience. According to
Lena Gamble’s experience, she seems not extremely impacted to a horrible
actions, but in this case she impacted to a narrow thoughts named
“stereotyping”. There seems to be more
than enough mysteries and curiosities to make the story in City of Fire worked quite well. A young woman is found in her bed
by her husband, the hapless victim sliced from stomach to neck. The LAPD
Robbery-Homicide Division’s Detective Lena Gamble determines a scenario that
has victim Nikki Brant’s husband as the killer. Not quite so fast. The murder
turns out to be the first in a series of gruesome crimes perpetrated against
beautiful women by the same man dubbed Romeo by the press. Gamble is been
caught in the headlights of high-profile murder in the past when her rock-star
brother was shot on the late-night streets of Hollywood years ago, a grisly
homicide the detective hasn’t fully recovered from. The memory of the lost
brother created a sense of hopelessness related to the city. As a result, Los
Angeles became a stereotype of an awful stereotype.
Stereotyping
on something is hard to be resisted. A stereotype is a belief that may be
adopted by specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things, but
that belief may or may not accurately reflect reality (jude and Park). Lena
Gamble had stereotyping on the image of Los Angles city as the murder capital
of the country. The traumatic memories about lost her brother made her thought
so. This is considered as a stereotyping statement because it is not match with
what fact says. According to US Department of Justice Federal Bureau of
Investigation, murder rate in Los Angles (559) in 2010 is still at average
level in United States, compared to Detroit (1,887).
In
conclusion, every bad experience can cause a trauma that impacted to human’s
thought. The trauma happened to somebody maybe barely happened or even not
considered as a not normal circumstance. Like what happened to Lena Gamble, she
had a thought of Los Angles as a murder capital of the country because of her
brother killed. That stereotyping thoughts is in contrast with the reality, Los
Angles is not the most murder capital of the country, it is only in the
average. No matter what the reasons are, stereotyping is not a good thing to be
applied to human’s life.
References
Judd, C. M., & Park, B. 1993. Definition and assessment of accuracy in
social stereotypes. Psychological Review.
US Department
of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform
Crime Reports. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl08.xls/view
accessed on 16-7-2012
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