Don Polk, a graduate of Cal-State San Bernardino, Cal-State Los Angeles and Boston University, is now focusing on his work as the founder and director of an advocacy and advisory group that serves private organizations, nonprofits and communities. His main focus at the moment has to do with stereotypes, though. Don Polk recently made a statement about the nature of how we look at other people and groups that we don't understand.



Don Polk believes that people create myths to explain their gaps in knowledge about other people and groups, just like we created the myths of little green men and Santa Claus. Creating myths and stereotypes for the people we don't truly understand can be dangerous, according to Don Polk, whether it is an individual belief or especially when it is a group belief.

Take the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in Germany, for example. Don Polk believes it was a crazed imagination and an outlandish set of stereotypes that led to this atrocity. People use their imagination to create a persona for the cultures, races, ethnicities and religious groups that they don't understand. Don Polk sees that stereotypes and crazed imaginations are just as ever-present today as they were in Nazi Germany.

One way that Don Polk believes we can begin combating these stereotypes and misconceptions is to talk honestly about our views and beliefs so we can deal with the sources of our misconceptions and often intolerant behavior. Don Polk believes that the media is often responsible for passing on hurtful and derogatory images of different cultures too, but those images are only based on the imaginations of the public. They are merely a mirror of our own derogatory beliefs.

The answer, according to Don Polk, is to be responsible for the ways we touch media, the arts, real estate and other facets of life, and let everyone else know that the earth is no longer flat and that there is a beautiful spectrum of colorful, culturally diverse life to explore.