Racial stereotyping is all too common in our everyday lives. Whether it is ourselves that are stereotyping against others or someone is racially stereotyping us it is all over. It is unfortunate that stereotyping is so common these days. One would think that in the year 2004 the world would have gotten past such outdated thoughts. Thoughts such as believing there is superiority in skin color. What is even scarier is the thought that stereotyping has been going on for more years than we imagine. We know this because we can see it in the earliest of literature. We can learn so much of our past from literature. One piece that helps us see the earlier existence of racial stereotyping is in the form of a play. In his play Othello Shakespeare invites us into his time period and how his audience reacts to such topics as stereotyping. In 1920 G.K. Hunter wrote an article called "Othello and Color Prejudice" which associates Shakespeare's Othello with racial stereotyping. Reading this article will highlight the effectiveness of the play. In Othello, Shakespeare defies cultural and racial stereotypes to change his audience's expectations about the Moor by giving Iago the role of the villain and having Othello play the victim.
             Cultural differences varied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from what they were. Hunter argues that "They had, to start with, the basic common man's attitude that all foreigners are curious and inferior- the more foreign the more inferior" (303). In that time period dark skin individuals were stereotypes as being overall lesser than
             whites. Dark skinned people were commonly referred to as dark animals or having witchcraft like powers, anything that would associate them with being anything other than good. There are many lines in the play that describe Othello with those associations: "an old black ram" (I.i.89.), "thou hast enchanted her" (I.i...