Discrimination: A Sociological Perspective on Power and Prejudice

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Discrimination is the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex. Additionally, it also includes disability and sexual orientation. It functions preservation for power which in turn ensures certain groups of people remain in minority groups or the ‘other’. Discrimination is a way to help people order, many psychologists label this as a coping mechanism as it helps to secure groups and creates community. However, this means people are more likely to compare themselves to others. Discrimination has many elements and involves the following elements; language, power and knowledge. Society uses language, knowledge and power to further divide itself. Language categorizes groups …show more content…

When discussing discrimination of minority groups, we need to ensure we look at the past, present and future. Knowledge acts as the platform required to manipulate and present opinions and viewpoints. The world has seen this many time before. The media use its knowledge and people’s ignorance to present a story and spin it in a way that stirs emotions within a communal group. Knowledge has seen that many groups experience the fowl hand of discrimination by utilizing negative information to highlight flaws of a group of people. We have seen this right here in Australia between European settlers and the indigenous. We saw European take what they consider to be ‘normal’ and view something different and implement changes to suit their own set of views. ‘For the first group, a set of popular, religious and scientific beliefs in the inferiority of indigenous peoples was matched by a set of practices of exclusion, control and discrimination tantamount to physical and cultural genocide. (Castle, 1996.) You can also examine the Russian revolution in 1917. The socialist party used the Tsars poor decisions in order to persuade those with a less educated background to overthrow the tsarist regime. We continue to practice this again in our current position. The world's political leaders all have privileged knowledge which can then be used to sway the public's decision and impact not only on their own personal lives, but the lives of

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