Prejudice And Discriminatory

Prejudice and discrimination are concepts that are still prevalent in contemporary society. There are two main perspectives that majority of people claim. The first is that prejudice and discrimination are inevitable. They believe that there will always be intolerant behaviour from groups towards other groups. They do not think that there is anything that can be done to prevent it. The other claim people make is that they do not understand how people can continue to be prejudice or discriminatory. They recognize that racist, sexist and other intolerant beliefs should not exist in a modern, progressive world. Both of the statements depict some aspects of truth, however, my understanding is almost a combination of the two. I believe that prejudice will continue to occur due to the existence of stereotypes. Stereotypes are defined as the beliefs about the shared characteristics of members of a group (Lecture #2, 2016). Unfortunately, stereotypes will never cease to exist as they are mental shortcuts, or schemas, that our brains naturally make. However, there are actions that can be taken to lessen the strengths of prejudicial and discriminatory behaviour.

Gonzalez, Riggle, Rostosky (2015) explained in their paper that prejudice behaviour includes negative attitudes and emotion, intolerance, and stereotyping towards groups. Furthermore, they stated that those who identified as non-White, women, nonhetereosexual, noncisgendered are stigmatized more frequently and consequently, these groups have their physical and psychology well-being negatively affected (Gonzalez et al., 2015). Due to the negative affects of prejudice, it is quite clear that there needs to be a more attention given to lessening