Deriding, diminishing, disparaging, and defaming a people CONSTANTLY, even  WITH an EQUAL amount of Positive Imaging, can be very damaging to an Individual and Communities' SELF ESTEEM

But with almost NO Positive Imaging, it can be Devastating!
Such an undeserved anchor to drag through a life that can be unkind anyway.

Raeleen D’Agostino Mautner, Ph.D validates those thoughts, while she helps to clarify the definition and varieties of "stereotypes", that behoove us to keep in mind.

She speaks of stereotypes, autostereotypes, heterostereotypes,  & sociotypes.
Accurate and inaccurate stereotypes. Positive and negative stereotypes.

A short and worthwhile read.
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Thanks to Manny Alfano of Italian Amrerican One Voice (IAOV)

The Impact of Stereotyping on Society and Individuals
 

Stereotypes are ideas people have about various group traits. Cross-cultural psychologists such as Triandis (1981) distinguish between autostereotypes, such as what Italian-Americans think about themselves; and heterostereotypes, such as what non-Italian-Americans think about Italian- Americans.

It is important to keep in mind that not all stereotypes are destructive. Some social psychologists believe that such cognitive "categorizations" serve to simplify our world for us and thus bring order to our thought process. Just as our senses are not equipped to deal with the entire range of visual or auditory complexity, our conceptual learning process is also helped by the perceptual hypotheses we make. Learned pre-conceptions or guesses about what is real, are our mind’s way of taking "short cuts" when sizing up a situation and drawing conclusions about it.

In culturally diverse populations, such as that of the United States, "non"-negative stereotyping can non only be benign, but according to Taylor (1981) can convey the positive benefit of leading to mutual attraction among different ethnic groups.

However, making broad generalizations about group characteristics becomes problematic and should give us pause when the stereotyping is inaccurate and negative.

Some stereotypes are accurate (Triandis, 1994). Such accurate stereotypes are referred to as sociotypes. For example, the stereotype that Italians in Italy are concerned about pollution is also a sociotype; because there is empirical data to show that over 70 per cent of Italians have expressed this concern on a recent nation-wide poll ((Martinelli, Chiesi & Stefanizzi, 1999). Empirical data should serve as the criterion for accurate ethnic group portrayal.

Another example: Nearly 90% of African-Americans are Democrats (Triandis, 1994). This too, is an example of a sociotype.

Conversely, the stereotype that all Italians are connected to the mafia is a distorted, inaccurate preconception that can have a harmful impact on both the individual and society as a whole. The overwhelming majority of Italians, empirically speaking, are NOT connected to the mafia, but of course Hollywood knows nothing about sociotypes. It gathers no empirical evidence to portray the Italian-American in an accurate light—be it in a socially desirable light or otherwise.

A recent survey about Sicilian culture (sicilianculture.com) and the mass media show that when asked three things that come to mind when thinking of Italian-Americans, Italian-Americans themselves gave responses such as “good food; intelligent; easy to get along with,”etc; whereas non-Italian-Americans thought of descriptions that were quite different; such as: “Mafia; Sopranos; greedy, sneaky, good food; New York violence and similar negative stereotypes.

What makes these stereotypes so inaccurate is that shows like the Sopranos, and movies such as the Godfather series, through a process called observational learning (Bandura, 1986), teach America that the characteristic of “gangster” represents the majority of Italian Americans, when in reality, organized crime, which is incidentally much more prevalent among other ethnic groups, describes only .0075% of this population (Sicilianculture.com/cinema/impressions.htm).

When society forms a false preconceived notion about individuals based on their ethnic group affiliation there are a number of repercussions, both for the individual and for the society in which he lives.

First, because our self-concept comes from social comparison feedback (Festinger, 1954), young Italian-American (I-A) children who are exposed more to negative media role models than they are to positive ones, may develop a distorted sense of who they are.

Their self-concept may come to include that of organized criminal as part of their ethnic heritage and personal identity. Society then, as would be predicted by the self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforces this negative self-concept on the basis of the inaccurate stereotypes that they have become accustomed to seeing.

It is not necessarily society’s fault, but rather that of the media for failing to take responsibility for diffusing a more accurate portrayal of Italian-American sociotypes to offset what should be a more proportional and occasional reference to organized crime.

Another unfortunate fallout from giving exaggerated airtime to gangster fantasy is what is commonly known of as copycat crimes. Since Albert Bandura first discovered the connection between exposure to TV violence and subsequent acts of violence in the children who watch (1963) we have watched the powerful effects of this genre translate to increasingly violent adolescent crimes. A steady diet of violence and crime also desensitizes the viewer to such images, leading to nonchalant attitudes regarding human pain and suffering.

Neither society nor the individual benefits by an exaggerated exposure to negative Italian-American stereotypes; and in fact we are collectively harmed by its impact. While consumer interest may be present, consumer interest is also there for fast food , which when consumed as a steady diet we know leads to disease.

STereotype1
http://www.mindlifesolutions.com/files/stereotype1.htm