Philosophy on Prejudice

We are all born into the world without a choice as to what colour skin or race or properties we have, and a sad thing is that we adults forget that we are all basically from planet earth and are part of mankind.

If you take an arab child, a black child, a white child, an islamic child, a hispanic child and put them together, they don't see race, they see people that they can come to love and become friends with. We should learn from children as their way of thinking is unclouded and profound. They dont see people in terms of skin or race.

If you were to go to war, and other people with you were of other races, you wouldn't be bothered about war, but instead you would go out together to fight the enemies, without being prejudice towards the other people in your armed forces.

The nature of human biengs is to seperate each other into sperate "races" and "nations", and becuase man draws a geographical lines and borders, ans when we look at people in other "nations" we see them as either "allies" or "enemies" but in truth we are human beings.

Also it is unfortunate that we take someone who has wronged us, and turn it into hate, we then take that person characteristics and attatch it to that hate, which is really ignorant and in reailty wrong.

We should look at each individual not by their race or skin or characteristics, but on what is on the inside.


"If the snow at the top of the mountain is impure, so to is the water which flows from the mountain.
Let us work to purify that snow" - Greg Park

 

We have evolved to see unknowns and things that are different as threats. We couldn't have survived otherwise. It is instinct for us not to trust what we don't know and to automatically dislike those that are different from us.

As for the grouping, that is just our way of organising and making sense of the world. It is much easier and quicker to stick things in a rough group than to deal with everything on an individual basis.

 

I'm afraid i've found an example to prove this wrong and it's the very thing your using, this forum.I look at people from Kay to Sarah, from Miéle to Higher Being and i just see people not some american, i see a friend and a fellow person.

 

true, but if we took away such things and loved as one body, that would no longer would be needed for survival as we would be as one family so to speak

Then you are without prejudice and should be proud of it.

 

The Internet brings down barriers because it removes the physical interaction. If we all met in person there would be the physical barriers caused by the mere sight of the other people (especially if there are noticeable external differences, such as skin colour).

 

Exactly, that's the problem which we must work together to solve.

 

I must admit that I am prejudiced, in a sense - against those who are ignorant or immature. Luckily, both of those pass in time. Besides, the most discriminatory I ever get is to tell them that they are ignorant/immature. It's kind of a... passive discrimination.

On topic, though, I have no issue with other "races", because as an anthropology major, I know the origins and original purposes of race. Race was invented by post-Roman Europe to explain how they were better than everyone else they met. It was further subdivided by the individual nations so that anyone not in an individual nation was considered "inferior" to all others.

In fact, at this time, the Muslims were possibly the most tolerant, racially, of anyone in the Old World. The Muslims would allow someone their religion, as long as they didn't overtly preach it, and conformed to all Muslim laws. The punishments for ignoring these conventions, though, were quite harsh, and usually involved painful death.

The European race concept was first put into practice around the time of the Crusades, when it was determined by the Pope that the "heathens" in the Middle East had no right to the Holy Land (which, by the way, contains Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, Islam's 3 holiest sites), and commissioned the Crusades to take the Holy Land by force. Then, it was put into play again in Africa, where the Europeans took slaves and "educated and Christianized" the "primitive heathens" in the name of money. Over and over again, people use race to rationalize what they are already doing.

I wonder how many Europeans said, at the start of African slavery, "Do we have the right to do this?", and the church just said "Yes, because black skin is primitive and we own them (by using some passage in the Bible which I don't remember)".

Now, in our time, racism seems to be slowly dying. But, looking at world history and the antiquity of race in the world, I estimate that, roughly and only as an educated guess, that at least 125 years will have to pass between the abolition of race laws (here in America and most of the industrialized world, anyways) and the extinction of racism. Humanity has never liked to give up on an idea without a fight. Race is convenient, to some people: "He's black", "She's Asian", "He's a redneck (Guilty as charged on that one, but I use it as a joke with some of my friends)", etc. Humans love categories. we just need ones that aren't offensive.

As has been said, the Internet removes the physical body from consideration when talking to people. I think that the Internet will prove to be a major force in the elimination of racism.

 

As I said, it would require us going against our very nature. Distrust is a natural defence mechanism to protect us from potentially harmful unknowns. It has become prominent in the gene pool because it was effective at keeping us alive. Basic evolution.

I'm not saying that prejudice is a bad thing, it's just that it would almost have to be bred out of us.

 

Sadly yes, it will take a long time to die out, if ever it does, thankyou for the information on the foundings of racism by the way.

public conditioning is able to make us all like minded, could it not do the same with this particular subject?

 

It would take many generations to do it. Just because we want to behave a certain way doesn't mean our sub-conscious will let us.

 

the reason people are naturally prejudice is because it helped people survive in ancient times i think. by looking at others, the person can determine if the other person can be trusted or not. of course that's probably not true in modern and civilized societies, but if you were say, a football player, you can see who you can trust by the uniform, same thing.

i think that prejudice is naturally occuring and i think that sometimes it automatically happens. i don't think there is anything wrong with prejudice thoughts as long as they just STAY thoughts. but people can probably argue that prejudice thoughts cause prejudice actions so i can see why people think it's wrong.

 

why not?

We used to believe in slavery, but through public conditioning we have been made to think of it as wrong.

Goos points, but does not the fdootball player point same the same thing as my one about war?

And I see what you mean by keeping them as thoughts being ok, but i would argue that prejudice thoughts leads to thoughts filled with hate, which leads to being a person controlled by hate, and, in such, one who will cause others to be people of hate.

 

Slavery and prejudice are two completely different concepts. Slavery occurred initially through ignorance and then continued by greed. Prejudice has genetic roots (as I have already stated). Public conditioning can treat ignorance easily (it can be eradicated in one generation) but it will be much harder to wipe out the "genetic" conditioning.

 

yes, i believe that prejudice works exactly the same in both cases since they are discriminating on the basis of appearance.

oh good, i was just about to say that, but you explained it better :)

 

prejudice is not necesserily all to do with with the natural defence of distrust, it can also be the psychological development which has roots in your upbringing such as your parents or siblings showing offense or dislike to a certain group of people or whatever theyre prejudice towards.

On the large part in todays society prejudice is bad because it causes people to be offensive to other without reason. An example of this is gangs. In london there are many gangs which "own" certain "territories" they are prejudice towards other gangs simply because they arnt one of them. A person who isnt in a gang is seen as a potential member by all gangs and therefore could join any (within reason) and who they would dislike or be disliked by would be decided simply by their choice of gang. Similarly, everyday people subconciously sort themselves into social groups which decide who they are for and against. E.g. chavs hate goths preps hate chavs goths hate preps and every1 end up in a vicious circle.

Distrust however is different. A young child will happily investigate anything which catches their intrest with complete trust. Should the child find this unpleasant, then the child wont trust it. However this doesnt mean that the child is prejudice towards it.

 

We have learned to love animals as ourselves,which surely, we would have been even more against. Why then should it be impossible to love others as ourselves, I do not mean to say that we can change it in a matter of one or two years, but that it is something that, in my opinion, should be changed, even though it may, and probably will, take decades, or perhaps centuries.

 

Your point is good, but the premise is flawed. Slavery was NEVER ignorant. Europeans started exploring again after the Dark Ages, and one of the first place they went was Africa (as it was basically next door to them). Once there, they found a whole new culture of dark-skinned people who lived simple lives in mud-and-thatch huts (maybe some larger towns or cities - I'm not really up on my African history; I know more about the European side of it).

They immediately, since their mission was to look for treasure and resources for a Europe devastated by war and rediscovering science, looked through these villages, quite violently, looking for gold. Where they found sources of it, they "conscripted" the local populace to mine it, since they didn't want to go back to Europe for it.

The Africans proved to be so efficient, I guess, or so easy to control, that they expanded the process, putting them in fields, homes, factories, anything that required menial labor. For hundreds of years, then, slaves were traded like property around Europe and America. Slavery is a result of racism (European racism, see above post by me) and greed. They knew what the Africans were - different from them. That was all they needed.

 

A natural part of the learning process for many species. Younger members observe the behaviour of older members and imitate it. This works on the assumption that if they have reached that age then they must be doing something right to survive. A recent study showed that chimps learned how to floss their teeth with human hair from their parents and other older family members by watching them. The older ones also seemed to be actively teaching them, thereby passing it on to the next generation and increasing the chance of the genes surviving.

Gang culture is just a smaller version of race culture. It is sort of a sub group. Within species groups form for protection and to aid in the acquisition of food and mates etc. If they meet another group they will probably fight, even though they are members of the same species. Although, in the case of lions, lone lions (which are almost always male) are not accepted into prides as they challenge the dominance of the alpha male. They tend to either form their own prides or take over existing ones.

Again, that is learning behaviour. We have evolved in such a way that if we find someone that gives an unpleasant sensation or causes pain signals to be generated then we will be much more unlikely to do it again in the future. This could be called mistrust, and is definitely of genetic origins (if it didn't help us survive it would have died out in the gene pool).

I thought the way they justified it was by saying that the people of Africa were sub-human (a very ignorant statement)? They also just copied what the natives did, slavery was a widespread practice in Africa long before the Europeans arrived (although, slaves were captured through war and conflict).

 

promiscuous virgin thats pretty much what i was saying ^^ i was replying the the comment that said that prejudice is in our genes when various psychological experiments show that for the most part it isnt.

p.s. nice sig understand its direction but dont agree completely ^^ ironically relevent to the arguement in progress ^^

 

What experiments? Surely if they are being based on human beings then they are being based on our evolutionary history as well?

I have given perfectly sound and reasonable reasons for all of the examples of prejudice mentioned.