Stereotypes will always be problematical for me.

To generalize is to be an idiot.
- William Blake

General notions are generally wrong.
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
- George Bernard Shaw

Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.
- Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

http://samvak.tripod.com/stereotype.html
http://racerelations.about.com/od/un...Stereotype.htm

Stereotyping is often distasteful, and frequently serves to reveal ignorance. There’s an old American proverb: those who constantly generalize "...learn less and less about more and more until (they) know nothing about everything."
(A Dictionary of American Proverbs, Oxford University Press, 1992, p.248)

Most stereotypes are dictated by prejudice, which usually is formed from a single perspective. Even if not done maliciously, they can lead to the more destructive process of ethnic and cultural profiling which is used to justify discrimination and persecution.

Some sociologists, in fact, contend that "...stereotyping reflects a power structure in which one group in society uses labeling to keep another group in its place."
(Hutchinson Encyclopedia, on the Web 12/4/03

"The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

[...]

It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense or our own value, our own position, and our own rights. [...] They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy."
— Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)

To me, stereotypes are control mechanisms that work to adulterate freedoms and unalienable rights.