True Affect of Prejudice

True Affect of Prejudice

Throughout our history prejudice has plagued our society. It has taken on many different forms and has been the cause of much suffering, turmoil, and subjective treatment towards minority groups around the world. There are three major kinds of prejudice; cognitive, affective, and conative these all help us to develop our own opinions for those within our own group and others who are not like us. We cannot talk about prejudice without discussing discrimination because this is the actual byproduct of prejudice. If we understand prejudice to be how we think then discrimination is how we act on this thought process. This will be manifested in one of three ways; personal/individual, legal, or institutional discrimination. Over all more than any other factor is the most powerful cause the senselessness. There will always be prejudice in our world for one reason or another but how we manage this aggression toward those who are different from us is the true mark of our individual character and the quality of a society as a whole.
George Aiken was once quoted to say “If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed, and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.” So if this were actually true then why is there such disharmony between our groups? Why would one be prejudice? What is prejudice? The formal definition of this word is baseless and usually negative attitudes toward members of a group, it is derived from the Latin word praejudicium which means previous judgment.
In order to get a better understanding of what prejudice is we must look at it from a perspective we can all understand. So let’s use pro-athletes as our sample group for now. As soon as I said pro athlete all of you immediately formed an image or opinion in your head of what an athlete is. Now for some of us that might be an American football player, a basketball player, or a baseball player. Some of you may have an image of a soccer...

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