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Intercultural Knowledge : Social Injustice, Privilege, Prejudice, And Discrimination

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VUSM 280 Final Paper
Erin Washington
Viterbo University

VUSM Final Paper
Intercultural Knowledge
Social injustice involves oppression, privilege, prejudice, and discrimination. Oppression occurs when social forces tend to hold people down and block their pursuit of a good life. (Hart, 2014a). According to Johnson, “Oppression results from the social relationship between privileged and oppressed categories, which makes it possible for individuals to vary in their personal experience of being oppressed” (2006, p. 38). In order to have the experience of being oppressed, it is necessary to belong to an oppressed category (Johnson, 2006, p. 38). Next, privilege is when one group has something of value that is denied …show more content…

128). Another aspect of social injustice is prejudice. It occurs when we judge a person based only on stereotypes about them, rather than a rational evaluation of the facts available to us (Hart, 2014c). Prejudice is an attitude and can have both negative and positive feelings associated with it. It involves both ideas and feelings and an example of the involvement of ideas and feelings would be the idea that whites are superior to people of color, and the negative feelings they associate with that assumption (Johnson, 2006, p. 54). Discrimination is another part of social injustice where the unfair treatment of people is based on some social characteristic where prejudice is put into action. Discrimination can be either blatant, where it involves hate crimes or physical aggression, or subtle where avoidance, exclusion, or rejection is used as a tactic (Hart 2014c). It is connected to how we think and feel about people, and those assumptions or stereotypes about a person or a group can play a major role in discrimination (Johnson, 2006, p. 54).
Media plays a big role in the stereotypes we assign to a particular group and whether those words used to describe that group are positive or negative. My understanding of these concepts of social injustice has changed over the semester in that I never consciously noticed how much of an impact the media plays on teaching these stereotypes and

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