A Simple Truth - Discrimination and Education.
Have you been in a situation in your life where you confronted or failed to confront a person who you thought was expressing prejudice or discriminating someone else? If you did, why did you confront that person? What made you want to move forward with this option? Or, if you didn't how not doing it made you feel about it?
Let's face it, we know that social categorization is kind of a basic part of us - humans. Of course this intrinsic nature of ours (taught - find ref - https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2015/04/05/prejudice-and-discrimination-is-learned/) drive us to conclusions about others very quickly. The silent discrimination engine may drive us to prefer to socialize with people who share our race or ethnicity, but without particularly disliking the others groups. But, the very nature of this, may lead us to prejudice and discrimination and it may even do so without our awareness.
The question of love and compassion comes to my mind. If we were able to truly love, like real love at its purest form, would we be able to discriminate or categorize people into groups? Let's take the example of a bunch of babies in a room, they may be from different countries and therefore have different skin color and different face shapes. Do they feel the need to categorize? They just play.
Would we all agree that discrimination influences the daily life of its victims in areas such as employment, income, financial opportunities, housing and educational opportunities, and why nopt say it - medical care. The real twister is to think that even with the same level of education and years of experience, ethnic minorities in the US are 40% less likely to receive callbacks for an interview following a job application (Ref - https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/18/16307782/study-racism-jobs). Based on my research about this alarming truth last night, I found that African Americans feel doomed and without options when it comes to etering the work force and if they do, to finding a sustainable path forward in their careers. Further, when we talk about health care and discrimination, I also found that African Americans have higher mortality rates than Whites for eight of the 10 leading causes of death in the US and have less access to and receive poorer-quality health care, even controlling for other variables such as level of health insurance. We know this has been out there for a long time, and we have studies and social movements fighting these inequalities forever, and yet, it is still here.
Now, most of us do try to keep our stereotypes and our prejudices to ourselves, and we work hard to avoid discriminating, and instead we try to incorporate - which is a beautiful thing. But even when we work to keep our negative beliefs under control, this does not mean that they easily go away. Have you been around a "Punk" or "Heavy Metal" or a "Biker" or a "homeless black dude" while walking, driving, etc. Honestly, when you see these people, don't we right away create a story in our heads about them? Maybe the Punk hard rock guy didn't get enough love, or the biker is aggressive and he is probably abusive to her partner, or the homeless guy might steal from you. An interesting study I read last night about Neil Macrae and his colleagues asking college student how they felt about skin-heads was fascinating to read (Ref- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232482010_Out_of_Mind_but_Back_in_Sight_Stereotypes_on_The_Rebound)
"College students were asked to write a paragraph describing a skinhead (a member of a group that is negatively stereotyped in England). One half of the participants were asked to be sure to not use their stereotypes when they were judging him, whereas the other half simply wrote whatever came to mind. Although the participants who were asked to suppress their thoughts were able to do it, this suppression didn’t last very long. After they had suppressed their stereotypes, these beliefs quickly popped back into mind, making it even more likely that they would be used immediately later."
Ah - interesting and mind-blowing. The silent discrimination and prejudice machine crawls in our unconscious minds at all times.
So, how can we reduce social discrimination? Found a very amazing explanation about this.
"One variable that makes us less prejudiced is education. People who are more educated express fewer stereotypes and prejudice in general. This is true for students who enroll in courses that are related to stereotypes and prejudice, such as a course on gender and ethnic diversity (Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001), and is also true more generally—education reduces prejudice, regardless of what particular courses you take (Sidanius, Sinclair, & Pratto, 2006).The effects of education on reducing prejudice are probably due in large part to the new social norms that people are introduced to in school. Social norms define what is appropriate and inappropriate, and we can effectively change stereotypes and prejudice by changing the relevant norms about them. Jetten, Spears, and Manstead (1997) manipulated whether students thought that the other members of their university favored equal treatment of others or believed that others thought it was appropriate to favor the ingroup. They found that perceptions of what the other group members believed had an important influence on the beliefs of the individuals themselves. The students were more likely to show ingroup favoritism when they believed that the norm of their ingroup was to do so, and this tendency was increased for students who had high social identification with the ingroup."
(Ref -
It is my belief that intolerant ideas should be fought through education. It would be great to synchronize this belief with families across the country and why not the world, because families ought to play a role in instilling tolerance in children from a very young age. Educational institutions must then take up that responsibility and put focus on countering the influences that lead to the exclusion of others. We all need to have a better understanding of human diversity in terms of the broader differences, such as race, nationality, culture and ethnicity, as well as in terms of individual differences, such as perspectives, beliefs, values, capacities and assumptions.
And .. what I found most interest is the concept of the Contact Theory in the context of discrimination and prejudice.Gordon Allport (ref - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Allport) articulated his contact hypothesis in his study called "The Nature of Prejudice" - from the perspective of social psychology. In a nutshell, social psychology tells us that if environments are created where people can work together as a team on a collective goal under clearly defined values that celebrate the equal and unique value for each person in that team, prejudice will be reduced ((the military focuses on social physiology to create strong bonds among teams members) However, in his study, Allport found that if people from different backgrounds are put together without any mediating strategies, there is a high likelihood that they will go very quickly into stereotypes, then to prejudice, then to anti-locution, and finally to violence, especially if the environment is highly competitive.
I will personally make a huge effort to understand that I'm bias, that I have some sort of intrinsic racism within me, and that I judge people. It is ok, we all have it and the conversation gets very uncomfortable when we try to share this view point. But, what are we going to do about it but just try again with love, compassion, and awareness.
Peace and Love!
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