Dangerous and Deadly Disease
Throughout history, humans have had the eagerness to explore lands different from theirs, to discover new things and meet people different from them. However, despite this eagerness, there is still a resistance to accept those who will appear to be different among us. In America, when we think of prejudice we often think of it in terms of Blacks and Whites. However, prejudice has proven to be much more than that, it affects everyone – the homeless, middleclass, working class and even the rich people. As fellow humans, who are we to judge another person based on how they talk, dress, look or act? But yet we all do it, we judge people on how different they are from us. According to Webster’s dictionary, prejudice is a “preconceived judgment or opinion formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge”. It is “an irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race or religion.”(1) To me, prejudice is a disease, with symptoms like fear, intolerance, ego, segregation, hatred, and discrimination, that affects people all over the world and that hardly has a cure for it. In this paper I will be discussing 3 different types of this disease (racial, gender and sexual prejudices) that have reared their ugly heads throughout all the Civil rights movements that we have studied this term. Education and communication are the first steps in resolving prejudice in humankind.