Reply To: Prejudice and Discrimination

[Anonymous]

Prejudice can have its roots in evolution and how we perceived other people way back. In order to survive, we had to make categories in our minds of safe and unsafe objects. We had to quickly decide whether a thing we see is a potential threat or not. The need for these quick decisions prevailed, even though it’s not necessary for us to make them anymore. We live in a world when our life isn’t at risk as much as it used to be for our ancestors.
But prejudice is just an attitude you have towards some objects. How the way you act in influenced by these biases – is discrimination. You can discriminate people because of how they look, how they act, by treating them poorly, worse than you treat other people, just because they are a bit more or less different than what you accept.
The comic strips showed a lot of different examples of prejudice and discrimination – how we can think or behave around people different than us or what we expect people to be. I think one of the important issues was the one tackled in comic called “Hoary old chestnuts”. It showed that we can say how we believe equality is important and it’s outraging that people can think less of others and yet we still can act completely differently. It this case, it was about discrimination against women working. The guy was angry somebody could say that women should stay at home so there would be more jobs available – and yet, when told their new boss is a woman, he was shocked and looked distressed. Sometimes I think it’s hard to blame people for their prejudices, because they are so hardwired into our heads that it really is our go-to reaction. But what really matters is how we put conscious effort into changing our outdated/preconceived beliefs, getting completely rid of the vile, harmful cognitive schemas.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by admin.