Prejudices: an essay on stereotypes and discrimination

What are prejudices? Prejudices is when you have an opinion about an object without even knowing anything about it, let me give you an example: “All black people wears a gun, and they are poor.” That was an example of a prejudice. I’ve actually read a text about a man and his wife, they were having a minor fight while they were doing the dishes, it ended up with her asking him, if he would have married her if she was black, he said; “No because then we would be from two different cultures and have different backgrounds, and we couldn’t love each other. The text is called “Say Yes” by Tobias Wollf. Why do people think like that? Well I think it’s because many people think they are protected behind their prejudice, they are scared of something different. Example: If a black man, moves in at a “white neighborhood” he would get a lot of friends there, because the white people would probably think that he is dealing drugs or something. What are the bad things about prejudices? Well the word itself is often seen as a negative word, so it would be weird if there wasn’t anything bad about prejudices. To begin with, it could stop many people from meeting friends with other cultures, or perhaps the love of their life, or something like a business deal. That’s a “mild” thing, it could also start a minor war, like a civil war, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it also could start something like a new war. That’s some of the worst thing it could do. Things like murder and stealing could also be caused by prejudices. What are the good things about prejudices? Well some of the good things could be, lesser chance of being stolen from. Let’s say that some rich people, lives close to a black neighborhood, they would by extra alarms, and extra locks, just to be sure, because they think that black people steal, that’s actually the only thing I could think of that was a good think about prejudices. What do I think about prejudices? I thinks it one of the most annoying barriers there is in the world, it closes people up too much, they get too little knowledge about other cultures especially if they keep it that way.