Prejudice

Hi,

I would like to share about what I learnt about prejudice in Term 2. We started analysing "To Kill A Mockingbird" from Term 1 and one of the most obvious themes the story is based on is prejudice. Prejudice is an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason. Contrary to common knowledge, there are many forms of prejudice; class prejudice, racial prejudice, gender prejudice, etc.

In my opinion, I believe that prejudice is bad. Although I have to admit that I occasionally judge people based on their appearances, I think that prejudice is just an unfair way of treating somebody because it is inaccurate and does not give the opposite party a chance to show his/her true self. Once someone has prejudice against another group of people, it will be hard to change this thinking because the prejudice will stay in a person's mind like a brick wall and needs something big to break it down. For example, if a person is prejudiced towards females, but when that person is saved by a woman when drowning, he will definitely change his mindset about females. Furthermore, prejudice can also lead to discrimination, where the opposite party will know about this prejudice and will be hurt. This is unfair to the victims because they did nothing wrong, hence not deserving to get treated so badly by another person. We should also not assume that everybody has a strong character, because a depressed person can take the action very seriously and will be hit with a very huge blow. Therefore, prejudice only leads to bad consequences where a party's feelings will be hurt.

Therefore, since prejudice is bad, we need to learn how to carry a positive attitude towards all people to do something to curb this problem. However, this is virtually impossible because everyone has the freedom of thought so we cannot control what they want to think. Thus, we need to start from ourselves and hope that we can be able to influence others to follow our actions. Firstly, we should try not to judge a person straight away and put ourselves in the other person's shoes to understand him/her better. If we know that person, we should take a step further and talk to the person so that we can find the person's character, because I believe that a person will take time to unfold and show one's character. Next, we should also try to think before we act so that we can prevent prejudice from becoming discrimination. Perhaps we could spend a few seconds thinking whether our intended actions are rational so that we can avoid hurting other people. Lastly, we should take a stand against prejudice. For example, we should not join other people when they are having fun making racist remarks. If we have the courage to do so, we will then be able to free ourselves from prejudice.

In conclusion, I think that prejudice is still prevalent in the world, which is bad because it only places barriers between people of one Earth. We need to learn how to accept one another's differences, so that we can live harmoniously and peacefully.

Nathanael