Prejudice - Making Judgment Without Any Evidence

When a person hears the word prejudice, he or she might think it only means racial prejudice often found between those with light skin and those with dark skin. However, prejudice has much deeper sense than a person's color. Prejudice is found between gender, religion, cultural and geographical background, and race. People have discriminated against others based upon these attributes from the beginning of time. Prejudice has become a serious problem in our society today. Our society is completely full of such hatred based upon peoples' beliefs and origins and it seems millions are fighting each other for no relevant reason at all. To understand prejudice, we must first consider all the factors that contribute towards it, and then find a way to counter these factors one by one. There is no simple one-word answer to the question of what causes people to be prejudice. The result of prejudice originates from many complex mixtures of environmental factors, upbringing, media, economic status, and finally experiences.

According to Webster's Dictionary, Prejudice is the process of "pre-judging" something. It implies coming to a judgment on a subject before learning where the prevalence of evidence actually lies, or forming a Judgment without direct experience. In other words Prejudice is an unfavorable or favorable opinion or feeling formed without any knowledge and logic basis. In most cases, these unreasonable feelings, opinions or attitudes results in biases toward the members of such groups, often based on social stereotypes. A stereotype is a generalization, characterization, or imaging of a group based on an unfair judgment. At its most extreme, Prejudice results in groups being denied benefits and rights unjustly or, conversely, unfairly showing unwarranted favor towards others. People are not aware of different cultures, so they form false assumptions.

There are several types of prejudice in American society based on sex, age, or race. In the 1600's, white men used Africans as slaves and treated them as if they were not human. "Colored" people were not even allowed to use the same drinking fountains as white people until the mid-1900's. However, it is important to understand the main difference between prejudice, and discrimination. Prejudice is an opinion or feeling towards a group, while discrimination is the act of making decisions based on sex, race, religion, cultural and geographical background rather than individual merit. Racism is the most common reason for discrimination in this American society.

Racism is commonly defined as a belief where inherent biological differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement; with a effect that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others. As a result, people discriminate and create stereotypes on the basis of an individual's race. A very common cause of racism is frustration. If one is having some sort of a social problem, they tend to get very angry with people who are not even concerned with their situation. For instance, when a person is having a tough time economically, they find it easy to blame immigrants for taking away their jobs or creating fewer opportunities. This type of an analysis is very easy to make but when one makes this assumption, it usually leads to hate towards any minority group. One probable explanation for this prejudice is fear. Every human being posses the sole sense of self-protection which leads to a not deliberate act of prejudice. Certainly, any human being will feel fear if a Black American approaches him at midnight in the streets of Manhattan. He or she will probably start walking faster or taking any kind of precaution to avoid a possible robbery. However, people will react in a different manner if it is white man. Although some may argue this is self-protection, it is a subconscious act of prejudice and racism. The only solution to this problem is to eliminate racism.

Another form of prejudice is Sexism. Sexism is commonly considered to be discrimination and/or hatred against people based on their sex rather than their individual merits, but can also refer to any and all systemic differentiations based on the sex of the individuals. Sexism has always been a major issue for women. This is why women in United States sometimes are pay lower wages than man. Moreover, societies have created the bias that women should not work and stays in homes, Companies also prefer employing men because they won't need in the future a three month maternity leave. While everyone is busy worrying about extinguishing sexism towards women-which still is an issue that needs to be taken care of, who is concerned with sexism towards men? Sexism is just as much of an issue to men as it is to women. Many people believe that men have advantages over women when comes to a topic such as occupation. Although this may be true, in some cases it is in fact exactly the opposite. Today's society is so concerned with political correctness and equal rights to women that it has almost completely forgotten about equal rights to men as well.

Age discrimination in employment may differ somewhat from race and gender discrimination, in that it does not usually take the form of wage discrimination. Older workers, on average, make more than younger workers do. Firms may be afraid to offer older workers lower wages than younger workers. Instead they will simply not promote or not hire an older worker. They may also encourage early retirement or layoff disproportionately older/more experienced workers.

The main cause of prejudice is American society media. The effect on prejudice of television and the movies is substantial. The media's portrayal of racial and ethnic groups may be a person's principal source of information. Therefore, if the media communicates primarily in stereotypes and the viewer has little opportunity for personal contact with members of that minority, the probability of the stereotype becoming the reality to the viewer is high. Also Hollywood movies have thoroughly dehumanized the nonwhite world. The whites, who are the exploiters, consistently show up as the "good guys." Whites are portrayed as the bearers of civilization and all that is just and humane. Their superiority is taken as the natural order of things, and their "justified" extermination of the nonwhites provides a "happy" ending.

Prejudice and Discrimination may have many of reasons. It is necessary to end with the stereotypes in order to achieve a complete social equality. We can greatly reduce the amount of prejudice in our world today, yet it will never completely go away, society has seemingly come to except all races, religions, and genders, and supposedly has achieved "political correctness," we also need to raise our children to accept all people, no matter what god they do or do not believe in or what color skin they may have. If children are raised around people who are not the same as they are, then they will most likely not think anything different of people who do not look the same as them or believe what they believe. If we raise our children to believe all people are equal from the start, then prejudice will slowly disintegrate over time.