The Origin of Prejudice

When we were children, our parents used to teach us how to greet others, how to respect the older people, how to care the younger and how to interact with our peers. They share their values to us, consciously or unconsciously and we become an imitation of them…. for a while, until we are closer to our peer than to them.

As we grow older, we interact with many kinds of people. We learn about different cultures, different manners and we develop our own perspectives about something which is different from our parents’, since we grow in the different world of theirs in their youth. We face different circumstances, but what they’ve shared in our early life somekind remain strong in our mind.

Values that our parents have shared to us sometime not only in a positive term of “how to do something” but unfortunately they also passed hatred feelings and of course it influenced how we react to “things” that our parents hate.

It -from my point of view- is how the fight between two close tribe can last very long and this is how prejudice formed and kept.

Our parents taught us that “we” are different from “them” in almost everything and somehow “our” is always much better than “their”. This “we” VS “They” or “our” VS “their” prevent us to know more about “them” since our parents told us that they give very bad influences for us.

..and then come a moment where we cannot avoid “them” anymore, we have to deal with them, since they are also human and a citizen in our region. First, we always think that our parents are right in everything they told about “them”, since we hate “them”, we only look at their behaviors that fulfill our judgement and ignore what good deeds “they” have done. We entirely forget about “exception” or even “presumption of innocence”.

Luckily, the social pressure draw us closer to each other and we are forced to change our hate a little bit since we have to *for example* complete a project that really important for our futures with them and we are tired to hate every single moment we’ve shared with them. Then we start to open our narrow mind to finally see them as a unique individual, not only as a part of “bad reputation group.”

Interaction between the two groups that have strong prejudice for each other and definitely show discrimination among them is the first step to make them try to understand their differences and make them see those differences as something usual, not something to hate for.

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