Yes people have acted prejudiced against me and I imagine everyone has their stories of prejudice. There is a tendency to like that which is similar to us and be wary of that which is different. This may very well have been an early survival mechanism. If you don't know it is good or bad then be careful.
Another thing we know is that random rewards to stimuli work best. This comes right from Stimulus / Response psychology. You want that chicken to peck really hard on that bar then provide food on a random schedule. When looking at prejudice this also holds. When you want people to be prejudiced against something then prove they at right on a random schedule. You want people to fear African Americans, don't tell them all African Americans are bad just the occasional African American, and by the way you cannot tell which one. And so prejudice is strengthened. Starts with a wariness of the unknown and is reinforced with anecdotal evidence.
If you look at President Obama, first note he is different. He is different from other people by being black, being super intelligent, having lived in foreign countries as a child, having attended school in a foreign country, being the product of an interracial marriage, being an atheist and converting to Christianity, and on and on and on. The natural result is that people are by nature wary of President Obama. Combine this with lies, like he was not born in America and we have outright prejudice.
How does one fight prejudice. The first answer is with education and in particular education about how science and statistics work. Now statistics are not always in your favor. Take for example a fact that there are a higher percentage of African American men in jail than men of any other race. Should that make President Obama a criminal? The answer is no. We need to observe the phenomena more deeply. We need to get to the reasons. Only by achieving a deeper understanding of why so many African American males are sent to prison can we know whether or not we are dealing with prejudice. The answer in this case is clearly yes.
Yes, I say be wary of that which is different. I also say learn why that which is different is different and decide based on knowledge how best to respond. Also be aware that knowledge is not something that is some fixed body, but rather an ever changing body. New facts are being added. Facts are being revised as we realize our observations were tainted. Generalizations are shown to be untrue. Causality is not what we think. Deductions based on invalid knowledge are wrong. Only by recognizing the above can one deal with prejudice.
Then there is the serious problem of faith. One way of looking at faith is believing either without knowledge or with faulty knowledge. We had faith that the world was flat until someone sailed around the earth. From where I look, the earth always looked flat. We had faith you could fall off the edge of the earth until Columbus returned from the islands he discovered. When people refuse to change when confronted with facts that is usually due to faith. Evolution was considered a fact in Darwin's day. Darwin only postulated the means as "selection of the fittest." But many have faith that evolution does not exist despite incontrovertible evidence that it does. Bacteria evolves. Medicine made some bacteria less fit, other bacteria developed and now we have to deal with it. Modern medicine depends in part on an understanding of evolution.
The hard part is that the constitution says that the government my not support religion, the source of much faith and a whole lot of prejudice. I personally believe that our government should not only not support religion, but should take an active role disabusing people of where "faith" is demonstrably wrong. Government should and must fight prejudice when the body of knowledge that we have, as incorrect as it is, shows that we are dealing with prejudice.
Comments are closed on this story.