Prejudice And Discrimination In America

Discrimination and prejudice are widely known in United States history. In the 1960's the civil rights movement demanded legislation and passed laws, which banned discrimination. Five decades later, it still continues in our society. Discrimination and prejudice occur when a group of people feel they are superior to another, and can be based on a person's color, race, national origin, religion, sex and gay couples.

Across the nation, millions of Americans of all races turn on the television or open a newspaper and are bombarded with images of well dressed, articulate, attractive black people advertising different products and representing respected companies. The population of black professionals in all arenas of work has risen to the point where seeing a black physician, attorney, or a college professor are becoming more a common sight. More and more black people are holding positions of respect and authority throughout America today, such as Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Condelezza Rice and many other prominent black executives. As a result of their apparent success, these black people are seen as role models for many Americans, despite their race.

An American is a man, a woman, a child who came to the U.S. and started to grow and flourish to become the men and women that feel pride for their country and the freedoms they have through salutes to the country and leaving behind their past heritage to become a citizen of the U.S. We as Americans have very well tried to become who we are today by not being prejudice and not being without freedoms. We strive to be the best we can by saying our pledge of allegiances and our doing as much as we can for our country. Just as my grandfather does every morning by saluting of the flag always hanging in his yard up high.

I was born and raised in Europe. I have learned from my history books that there were freedom and equality in the United States. I learned that, among many other rights, people enjoy freedom of religion and freedom of speech - the rights that were envied by millions of people of the Eastern Block countries.

In this modern world, prejudice is still a universal problem we still have yet to overcome. Although it is true that our society is much less prejudiced than it was 40-50 years ago, we are still struggling to create racial harmony in a world that is so diverse in terms of racial group, sexual orientations, ethnicity, nationality, religions, and so on. I think the core of prejudice comes from stereotyping, which is the generalization of motives, characteristics, or behavior to an entire group of people. In the world where media propaganda is ubiquitous, often times most stereotypes are not formed on valid experiences, instead they are based on images publicized by the mass media, or even created within our heads after seeing and hearing examples from many different sources, like movies, or even hearsay. Stereotyping is more powerful than we think, because it allows those false pictures to control our thinking that leads us to assign uniform characteristics to any person in a group, without consideration of the actual difference between members of that particular group.

Strong racism, disrespect and condescending sight towards black people, immigrants or any other race apart from white´s was very common in the United states during the sixties. The society had wide gaps and divisions between most of all black and white people, but also between men and women, rich and poor to name a few. There was rules that only the black people had to follow, shops and buses. The living conditions were bad, a lot of black people were poor due to bad jobs and living arrangements.

The United States is a nation of immigrants plagued by hatred for one another. Prejudice and discrimination is more than one occurrence in history or the actions of a single individual. Discrimination was imbedded in our past by our ancestors and has afflicted our lives even today. The media, books, and movies instill the stereotypes that fuel the prejudice and hatred among our country’s people. Numerous times movies have chosen to use people of color to portray the villains and uncivilized beings in their films causing their idea of a villain to take place in the mindset of American citizens. Prejudice is rooted in our history and has become the nation’s deadliest disease, but to rid our nation of this plague we must first look for the cure in ourselves and push for legal reform.

Prejudice is defined as preconceived notions or judgments about a person or group of people based on stereotypes and not actual experience. While prejudice stems from a more understandable social need of humans to be able to predict other peoples’ behavior, it nearly always leads to discrimination and hate. In modern American society, most people would say that the prejudices that so negatively accosted minorities and women are gone. What tricks people into believing this is the level at which most prejudices now control American life. Institutions with massive power over social standards, such as the education system and economic institutions, are so embedded with prejudgments on core levels that it isn’t always immediately clear that they are even doing anything wrong. This leads to discrimination being justified because “that’s just the way things are.” The issue is that modern Americans are not fully aware of how much societal norms affect every decision they make, nor are they aware of how much change they could effect on current social norms if they tried. As long as these negative preconceptions are disguised by social institutions as the only way that America can operate and Americans continue to see societal patterns as facts of life rather than changeable behaviors, it can be guaranteed that prejudice will continue to control every aspect of American society as it has from the day the country was born.

America was languishing as a nation because the people defaulted. "One hundred years later, the negroes are still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land" (3). Even today we are struggling because of racism. It takes only one story or experience to hate all black or white people and that's the main cause of discrimination or racism. We are all brothers and sisters according to Martin Luther King Jr. If we don't continue to fight off discrimination and racism, Dr King risked his life for nothing. He died doing what he loved and believed in, spreading his speech through out America. "It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory

Discrimination and racism impacts everyone in the U.S. in some way, shape or form. It can have harmful psychological impacts on those who are directly affected – especially if the situation becomes traumatizing. Several studies surrounding discrimination have shown an increase in both physical and psychological problems. According to two journals, those affected run the risk of developing depression, the common cold, hypertension, breast cancer and cardiovascular disease, among other things (Takeuchi, & Williams, 2013). It is apparent to see that discrimination, racism, social interaction and health, are persistently correlated with one another.

My personal experience with racism has continuously been not only horrifying but also traumatizing. When I was still an adolescent, a Russian Employee yelled at me, cajoled me; ridiculing my attire that was revealing of my racial descent. I deduce this unfortunate experience as a continuum of the ethnic conception of the classical American society, which perceived persons from my racial fabric to be of least importance in the society and incompetent to partake in any progressive initiatives of the community. However, I made one novel observation having analyzed this incident keenly. The aggressor was a Russian. This portends a great shift from the manner in which racial discrimination was rooted in the society a century ago. By that time, any other Race apart from the original White American society was subject to discrimination. Even though my race was at the very bottom of the pecking order, it was unnatural for Russians to be on the offensive but now it seems that the society has changed a lot.

Racist doctrines are based on reasoning, express or implied, of the superiority of one human group over others and the belief that biological, social and cultural differences between human groups are transmitted hereditarily.Racism is also a colonial ideology invented to promote the conquest of other continents by Europeans. The best way to exclude human beings to exploit them, sometimes as slaves, was to say they were not quite human. Therefore, the dominators had no moral obligation to face the dominated.John hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915 to attorney Buck (Charles) Colbert Franklin (1879-1957) and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin. He was

Race discrimination involves treating someone unfavorably because he/she is a certain race. Color discrimination involves treating someone unfavorably because of skin color complexion. structural racism, state racism or systemic racism is racial discrimination by governments, corporations, religions, or educational institutions or other large organizations with the power to influence the lives of many people.

3) Choose 3 characters from the movie and describe how discrimination, prejudice, or stereotyping affected or defined their character. Stereotyping: Tito (Gabriel Chavarria), a Hispanic student, displays an act of stereotyping Jamal, a black student, by drawing a picture of Jamal as having big, fat lips. The stereotype being that all black men have big fat lips.

Prejudice have a major causes in American society. People who are prejudices have a negative feeling towards a group and its members from different groups.There are different kinds of prejudices towards different groups and these prejudices have very different emotional components to them we judge people and groups based on our prejudices and stereotypes and treat them differently, we are being engaged in discrimination, racism, parents, and gender seems to be a continuing source of tension in many societies around the world as prejudice.