Essay on The History of Prejudice and Discrimination

America has had discrimination against minorities for a long time and it will continue to have it until people treat minorities with respect. Discrimination is when people treat minorities bad because of their skin color, ethnicity and the place they were born. For immigrants, the problems they had to arrive to America were not a good experience only by the struggle to gain acceptance among the population. Most immigrants came to the U.S. to have a better life and give education to their children. Almost all immigrants have experienced discrimination at some point in their life and even some are still experiencing it today. Most Latinos don’t have a choice but to deal with it because they know they are illegal and they can’t say anything

In today’s society, we face prejudice every day in many forms. Most people in today’s society have either been victims of prejudice or are guilty of exhibiting prejudice towards others.

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.

Prejudice is when we have a preconceived opinion about someone or a group of people that is formed without knowledge, or even a real understanding about them.

There are different levels of discrimination and often times, most people do not realize they are prejudiced. “While most people want to be fair, we can’t help but have preconceived notions”. This quote just shows how some people are raised to either dehumanize or respect a person more because of their race or background. Just like any other learned behavior, prejudice is integrated into the lives of many and plays a huge role in society. Stereotypes and personal experiences strongly contribute to the unintentional actions a person gives off towards a certain type of person or group.

People are not born prejudiced. “It is something that is learned". It can be learned in the same way other attitudes and values are learned, primarily through association, reinforcement and modeling. For example, children may learn to associate a particular ethnic group with poverty, crime, violence and other negative things” (2006 Anti-Defamation League). Also, prejudice in “children may be reinforced by listening to derogatory ethnic jokes, especially when others laugh along or think they're cool”. Lastly, children may simply imitate the prejudices of their older family members and popular friends. Prejudice is to pre- judge. “Prejudice is a baseless and usually negative attitude toward members of a group. Common features of prejudice

Jonathan Rauch, while making it obvious that prejudice is one of the worst things about society today, he explains that it lies within us all. It is in fact, inherent. To believe that someone is prejudice, means you’re prejudice. There’s no escaping it. He starts off his piece by addressing

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.

Most people in today’s society may believe that prejudice and discrimination mean the same thing and most people may not pay attention to the fact that there is a huge difference between the two terms. The main difference between these terms is, prejudice is a negative idea about a certain group of people or people of a particular race. The person usually doesn’t act on the idea, they mainly just keep it to themselves. Most would describe it as being a “pre-judgement”. Discrimination, on the other hand, is far much worse than just being prejudice. Discrimination is prejudice put into action/practice. This involves treating people harmfully and disrespecting them as an individual just because they don’t look like you or because they belong to a specific group of people. There are three different forms of discrimination and they are: Individual Discrimination, Statistical Discrimination, and Institutional Discrimination. Both of these terms falls under the category, racism. Racism is the most talked about thing in the United States today. I completely disagree with the term “racism” as a whole and I completely disagree that it is being taught. Blacks and whites of the United States should always be against racism. Racism is not something that we are born with--it is something that we are taught and honestly society, parents, teachers, and movies play a big role in it. Some can teach it the right way and some can teach it the wrong way, and this is where we went wrong in

Unfortunately due to our past history, discrimination had been among us from since decades. Discrimination and prejudice would probably be among us until the end of the world. Prejudice and discrimination is an action that treats people unfairly because of their membership in a particular social group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs to rather on that individual. It is an unfair treatment to a person, racial group, and minority. It is an action based on prejudice.

In psychology, prejudice is different from discrimination. Prejudice is an unjustifiable and often negative stereotyped attitude that a person holds against the members of a particular social group. Whereas, discrimination is when prejudicial attitudes cause members of a particular group to be treated differently than others in situations that call for equal treatment. Thus, prejudice leads to discrimination. There are several factors that contribute to prejudice and discrimination, and there are many techniques for reducing the development of prejudice and discrimination.

Sometimes we as people are prejudice without even thinking about it or thinking that we

In today’s world, there are many social issues, like poverty, vandalism and unemployment. However, prejudice has become the most dramatic one. Prejudging people for their appearance is a common practice that humans perform. People are not only ridiculed for their color, but also by their religion, sex or age. Therefore, I consider that racism, ageism and sexism are the three major problems in our society and we need to cease them immediately. Much of our world’s history were based upon racism. In the 1600’s, white men used Africans as slaves and treated them as they were not human. "Colored" people were not even allowed to use the same drinking fountains as white people. Fortunately, in the last three decades, race

Prejudice is the negative attitude based on false generalizations about members of different racial and ethnic groups. From prejudice, discrimination is born. We all are guilty of discriminating other people, but one can only speculate the factors that bring about this hatred towards one another. Although a single cause cannot account for the presence of racism, factors such as socialization, self-justification, and competition are a few human attributes that lead to acts of racial discrimination.

Social conformity can be toxic, it often leads to the epidemic that is prejudice. To give a better idea of what prejudice means, Judice translates to judge in Latin, therefore the term “prejudice” literally translates into “pre-judgment”. There are innumerable forms of negative preconceived notions that exist in our world today, the biggest one being racism, which often is a stem of having anti-immigration views. Immigration prejudice is not unknown to any person who lives in America and has eyes and ears to know it exists, but it’s important to know that prejudice is not innate, it is learned, and as long as we allow our society to practice xenophobia among present and future generations we will never be free of it.