Discrimination And Prejudice In American Society

Discrimination and prejudice are problems that have plagued American society since its founding. Up until the late nineteenth century people feared the American Indians, and until the mid-twentieth century it was legal to deny someone services or education based on the color of their skin. It was only until recently that it became socially acceptable to treat people with different skin colors as equals. What lay behind these issues, why did people accept these things as the norm, and how can discrimination and prejudice be overcome are going to be the main focus of this paper.
First of all, what are discrimination and prejudice? These two words, as defined by Merriam-Webster, mean respectively: “the practice of unfairly treating a person or …show more content…
According to the social identity theory there are three processes that are responsible for the formation of a person’s identity within his social network. These process are social categorization, identification, and social comparison. Everyone assigns others to different categories based on occupation, age, and sex to name a few. If a person sees that he is part of a negative category to most of society when he comes to the identification stage where he forms his social identity he will place himself into a negative category in his own mind. To make himself feel better, the person in mind will reach the social comparison phase look at what he formed in the categorization stage and say to himself ‘at least I’m not as bad thus-and-such group’, thereby causing members of said group to repeat the process. It is a vicious cycle, and almost impossible to …show more content…
This is when there is frustration, anger, stresses, and other sorts of negative emotions in a social majority and the majority takes these emotions out on a social minority. One example of this is the Holocaust. The Germans had just been socially, politically, and economically destroyed by World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. Adolph Hitler came along and focused the pent up rage of the German people on numerous minorities, mainly the Jews. He essentially gave the social majority a punching bag that they could use to relive their anger that could not fight back. This is perhaps an extreme example of scapegoating, but within the last hundred years there have been numerous examples of scapegoating that have ended in genocide: the Armenian Genocide of 1915-17, multiple military leadership purges under Joseph Stalin, and the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 to name a few. So while it may seem harmless to blame a person or group for your problems, that same attitude has resulted in some of history’s most condemnable