Discrimination: Cultural Relativism and Black Person Essay

Submitted By ashleymann
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Pages: 5
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Prejudice is the opinions and attitudes of one person, or a group, against another person or group. Every single person has their own stories to tell, everyone has had certain things happen in life that change everything for them either in a good way or a bad way. It is unfair to judge someone without having walked in their shoes but yet it happens every day. You see people walk by homeless people and turn their noses up and just assume the homeless person is an alcoholic or a drug addict. I think a lot of the time people with prejudices tend to be people who have had hard lives, who have a chip on their shoulder for some reason. If I am having a bad day I may assume everybody is staring at me or talking about me, if I am having a good day I will instead smile at everybody and generally be a cheerful person. If I may use the homeless example again; say someone is having an exceptionally good day, that person got a raise, got engaged, found $50 on the street and won money on a scratch ticket. After all of those great things happened assume that person was walking and saw a homeless person up ahead on the side of the street. With the chain of events that I described having occurred, that person may look at that homeless person and think, wow it is terribly unfortunate how some people’s lives turn out. That person may even spare some change. Now let’s change things up a bit. Let’s say there is a person who lost their job, lost their fiancé, lost their wallet, and broke their phone. If a person were having an incredibly bad day like that, what are the chances they will be expressing compassion for anyone else? Not high. So say that person is walking down a street and sees a homeless person up ahead, as I said this person is not likely to stop and have any compassion for someone else, I think chances are greater that they will then turn their nose up and think the worst. Prejudices can then turn into more than attitudes, it can turn into discrimination. Discrimination is stereotyping along with the acts of treating someone badly, or unfairly due to any number or differences. Some examples of differences would be race, religion, sex, or beliefs. One example of discrimination would be two people applying for the same job, one black and one white, the black person is without a doubt more qualified but the white person gets the job. That is discrimination against African Americans. The same example could be applied to demonstrate discrimination against women. So let’s say two people are applying for a job but instead of one black person and one white person, I will exchange it for one male and one female. The female’s credentials far exceed the males, yet the male gets the job, that would be discrimination against women. Some examples of stereotyping are; seeing someone driving badly and saying “that must be a woman”. Another example of stereotyping would be assuming all blonde people or all polish people are stupid. Another term which involves stereotyping is ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is a term used to describe people who judge other cultures who have different values then their own. One ethnocentric tendency is thinking their values are correct and predominant, superior to any other beliefs. In addition to stereotyping and a superiority complex, another ethnocentric trait is the view that they have the best ideas. Another example of ethnocentric tendency is not trusting people with different customs or people who are from different places. Ethnocentrism can become very dangerous, such as when Hitler thought the Aryan race was the best race and should be the only race. This resulted in the Holocaust. Even though the word ethnocentrism usually is associated with bad, it can also be good. It can give a small community a sense of stability and pride.
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