People Tend To Think Categorically
“It is a habit of American culture, and generally of Western Civilization, to classify things, to try to assign phenomena to classes or categories”. America has one of the most diverse populations among any other country on the planet. It is much easier to compartmentalize individuals based on physical attributes rather than examine everyone carefully to then find out more about who they are. Saying that people think categorically in order to identify with others would be mistaken, because a lot of times the people placed into certain categories do not feel like they identify with other members of that group at all.
The human brain is, for lack of a better word, lazy. It would prefer to neatly and easily place everything into its own little box without digging deeper or analyzing the potential overlaps found within them. In a society with such a diverse population, why would someone care if a person they meet is Chinese, Japanese, Laos, Thai, Indian, etc. when they could just call them an Asian? This categorical thinking ignores the vast differences in culture, lifestyle, food, and even physical traits that the people within them have. For instance, an Indian and a Chinese person may both come from the Asian continent, but their cultures have no similarities to each other but are categorized under the same race. It also ignores people who have mixed races and don’t identify with just one group. The textbook, Culture and Diversity in the United States - So Many Ways to Be American, poses two potential alternatives to traditional categorical thinking: continuum thinking and compositional thinking. Jack David Eller states, “In the continuum approach, diversity is ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital, ’ falling along a range of gradual variation instead of a finite set of strict distinctions”.
Continuum thinking tends to address categorical thinking by adding more layers to the categories, which allow more diversity to be identified within groups. It tends to identify a few groups as extremes and then categorizes everything else as a position in between those extremes. It becomes more inclusive of different kinds of white people, black people, Asians, etc. but still can’t accurately represent everyone correctly. It also is primarily applied to race/ethnic identification but can’t be applied effectively to identifying different genders, sexual orientations, status domains, among other groups of people. Compositional thinking tries to build on both of these by combining these differences rather than separating them. Eller compares compositional thinking to standard brain function when he says, “the brain is not a single homogeneous organ but a combination of many different specialized regions and sub-organs, each with its own (although not completely unalterable) function”.
Compositional thinking tries to deconstruct these overall similar traits, such as skin color, and group them together based on a conjunction of multiple similar features. Rather than separate someone into black or white, other factors would be encompassed to help identify what group they can best be identified as. This does require a more extensive thought process but leads to an accurate representation of who the person is over using either categorical or continuum thinking.
