Prejudice And Discrimination In The United States

Prejudice and discrimination are to words that are widely used across the whole world. The world is comprised of 7 continents and 196 countries. With roughly 6 billion people on this earth there are hundreds of different traditions, several different religions and belief systems and each country and nation has its own set of norms. With this many differences covered all over the world, it is easy for people to judge a different culture or group of people even if they do not know anything about them. The United States of America has been widely known as the melting pot solely due to the fact that people from all over the globe have traveled here to seek out all that this country has to offer. With the increase in diversity, prejudice and discrimination has become an increased issue all across the world but also in our own country. …show more content…
Prejudice usually occurs before meeting the person or group of people and making a premature and negative conclusion about him or her. The most common type of prejudice is the use of stereotyping people. A stereotype is a belief, positive or negative, about the characteristics of members of a group that is applied generally to most members of the group. Although stereotypes can sometimes contain a sprinkle of accurate information, many times this assumption of inaccurate information leads to the much larger issue of prejudice. When an assumption about one person is placed too broadly, we as human beings often apply that assumption to the larger group of individuals. Often time stereotypes are larger overgeneralizations about people. This generalization about a larger group of people is called the ultimate attribution error. Once we are introduced to the use of stereotypes, they usually come much more naturally to