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Discrimination In The Kite Runner Essay

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Discrimination is a disease. It is a disease that has plagued humans, especially minorities, as long as human interaction has existed. It leaves no people unharmed and sometimes even kills. It corrupts the minds of the many and scars the minds of the few. The plague comes in any forms, ranging from small remarks, to ethnic persecution. Discrimination is a problem that negatively affects people of all cultures all around the world, and like a disease, it needs to be eradicated.

The book “Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini illustrates discrimination with the treatment of the Hazara. The Hazara are a minority group in Afghanistan often discriminate against. The local bully in the story, Assef, torments a boy named Hassan, and his father, because they are Hazara. Assef taunts, “hey, you flat nosed babulu, who did you eat today? Tell us you slant eyed donkey!’(Hosseini 31) He picks on their ethnic traits and characterizes them as monsters. Assef believes that his race, the Pashtuns are “the true afghans, the pure afghans, not this flat nose here” and that the Hazara “pollute our homeland’ (Hosseini 33). He sees Hassan as lesser, dirty even, simply because of his race. The treatment of the Hazara didn’t improve much in Afghanistan, as after they took control of Afghanistan the Taliban “massacred the Hazaras in Mazar-i-sharif” (Hosseini 182).

Richard Rodriguez shines light on another form of discrimination in “The Hunger of Memory”. Rodriguez describes how when people meet him,

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