Prejudice Is Not A Joke Essay

Prejudice Is Not a Joke As a culture we tend to believe that because we have made great progress socially, we are no longer dealing with the struggles of racism and other forms of prejudice. If you were to ask any given person on the street about their views on prejudice towards another based on the color of their skin or their sexuality, people would give you great answers of how it’s reserved for those who are truly evil and hate other cultures, people who speak freely about their disdain. There is a fair amount of chance that at some point in that same person’s life they have told a joke or said something with prejudicial context. Prejudice is extremely prevalent in today’s society, and it can be found on the tongues and in the minds of the majority of people around us whether they hold hated against other cultures or not. As a society we are being far too lenient with some very derogatory actions because we dress them as jokes or claim that one group of people has the right to use a slur because of their race, and this frame of mind is the cause of much controversy. Although the reference of slurs and stereotypes in satire and conversation could show …show more content…
The words and phrases that people use now, especially stereotypes are heavily woven into our past, so any kind of connotation that comes with them is going to be extremely difficult to be rid of. There have been some words or phrases that have escaped their negative histories, such as the case with the word ‘gypsy’. The term was used in the earlier twentieth century by the Nazi party, and anti-Semitists as a derogatory word for the Jews. Since then though the word has lost its venom, and you can hear people all over the place talking about how they just “got gyped” out of something they