Prejudice Case

Sorry to Say, That is the way I feel

Phil Feria

Californian State University of Los Angeles

Prejudice has shaped the form of our present day societies and indeed, prejudice has also shaped societies since time began. Prejudice goes back as far back as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob people have been subjugated due to their differences and perhaps this is the reason why we have prejudice problems with the Islam nation to this day. The most famous examples of prejudice in history are iconic moments from the civil rights movement which include: When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus or when Martin Luther King Jr. tells an awestruck nation of his dream of equality and when Jesse Owens competes and wins an Olympic medal in 1936 with Hitler in the stands. There have sadly been so many examples of prejudice in the history of the world. The most extreme example of prejudice must surely be the Holocaust, the genocide of millions of Jews. Prejudice does not have to be violent like the Holocaust was, but the Holocaust was clearly motivated by prejudice. Another major example of prejudice in the United States has been the attitudes of whites towards blacks over the course of our history. This prejudice was manifested in such things as slavery and the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era with the segregation of public schools, public places, public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. There are other examples of religious prejudice in the world was well. An example of this would be the troubles in Northern Ireland that were motivated at least in part by religion. There have been examples of killings of Christians by Muslims in Iraq that were based on prejudice and the fighting between Shiites and Sunni are also examples of prejudice. All of these are famous manifestations of prejudice and how prejudice has been experienced over time. The rest of the reading will focus on modern prejudice and in schools and the work environment.

Today, there are many types of prejudice stereotypes and the way it appears to people in the lives of people in different forms. It is important to understand how prejudice stereotypes can come about in different forms when living in different parts of the world. Current types of prejudice events can be based on gender prejudice that include sexual harassment, job or academic discrimination; expectations to conform to gender role stereotypes, harassment and hearing demeaning comments, as each of these forms are rooted in the basic mistreatment of a group or individual because of a person's gender or sexual preference. But all-in-all, prejudice attitudes are all the same no matter what part of the world a person lives in, negative or positive, they all affect a person, just some of us are hit harder than others because of stereotypes a person may have grown up to believe and became accustomed too from life's experiences or where we happen to live and what are the beliefs in the geographic area.

Brewer and Brown (1998) define prejudice as an attitude directed toward people because they are members of a specific social group. These attitudes that people take are considered to be evaluations of what a specific person or group thinks of a social group as a whole. However, research has demonstrated that discrimination does not affect all individuals in the same manner, perhaps in part due to the effects of individual differences, such as personality characteristics, ethnicity, and/or gender identification (Crocker & Major, 1989; Porter & Washington, 1993).

A good example of this would be how people feel cognitively about prejudice is as follows: The way people think or feel it is harder to succeed due of their ethnic background and because of those internal feelings, some people may carry the feelings of not being accepted and even at times put others down due to ethnic backgrounds. In 2007, Cuddy, Fiske and Glick explain, research suggest that the evaluations of social group members are more strongly related to how a person treats those group members that are the beliefs or stereotypes he or she hold about them. Reactions such as these may be because of unconscious reaction that some people carry toward a social group as a whole, like all women are not as competent as men in certain job, this prejudice can even relate to men or individuals that belongs to a particular social group. Sometimes these unconscious gut reactions are often automatic that are relatively uncontrollable to us. The reactions can be positive and or negative depending on stereotype(s) a person perceives (Judd, Park, Ryan, Brauer, & Kraus, 1995).

Research studies have suggested that men experience gender prejudice at a higher level than what was previously assumed, while some have assumed to believe that men do not experience