| For
the most part, we tend to think of prejudice in terms of race,
culture, or religion, but the word has much deeper significance
than just the dislike of people with different skin colors or
religious practices than us. The term itself refers to a
"pre-judgment," or judging a person or culture or object
before
one knows anything about it on an individual level. It's a
judgment made with really no knowledge at all about the individual
or culture; thus, it's a judgment made in ignorance.
Most people
who tend towards prejudiced judgments make their decisions based
on incomplete knowledge, or they generalize a great deal. A
person who is prejudiced against Asians because a young Asian man
insulted him two years ago is generalizing that one person's
actions to an entire group of people, thinking that all Asians are
the same as the one who insulted him. The African-American
who despises white people because his or her father was treated
poorly by whites are judging all people with white skin to be the
same as the people who hurt his or her parents. The
Christian who slanders Moslems because they don't believe the same
things that he or she does is judging those people based on his or
her own belief system, and is not looking at them as human beings
who have grown up with their own systems of belief.
There is no
doubt about it: prejudice is easy. Developing a
prejudiced perspective of the world makes virtually everything
black and white, with no room at all for shades of grey.
People are good or bad, and prejudiced people don't have to think
further or learn more about anyone--their minds are already made
up, and that's all there is to it. Prejudice in some ways is
a form of mental and emotional laziness, and in other ways it's a
huge barrier that people use to hide behind, trying to eliminate
threats to their feelings of safety and well being. Prejudice
becomes dangerous when people try to get others to share it.
I may be prejudiced against people with green skin, but as long as
I keep that prejudice to myself it hurts no one but me. Once
I start to talk to my neighbor, though, and try to convince her
that all green-skinned people are bad, then I'm causing
harm. And when we start talking about what we should do
about the "problem" of green-skinned people, then we
become truly dangerous. In order to give ourselves
credibility, we distort reality, we stretch facts, and we ignore
the truth about the greenskins, just to make our case against them
stronger. At
its most basic, prejudice is our willingness to believe bad about
others without finding out the truth. And my prejudice
against greenskins means that I'm going to close myself off from
learning from them, I'm going to deprive myself of what they have
to share with me, and I'm going to live in fear of the greenskins
becoming stronger than me and doing something horrible to me to
pay me back for the way I feel about them. That's no way to
live a life, and by allowing my prejudices to control how I treat
others, I'm dooming myself to continued ignorance and future
fears. The
way to battle prejudice--in ourselves and in others--is
simple. We must educate ourselves as to the true nature of
all people. Individuals do not accurately represent any
racial, religious, or cultural group, and we're taking the easy
and lazy way out if we allow ourselves to define others by the
actions of very few.
from livinglifefully.com |
