Racism

8 Pages 2002 Words

The focus of this paper is the inequality involving racism. Racism exists because of a combination of prejudice and discrimination. Racism is a social problem that still occurs today, against entire ethnic groups in most cases. Causes, examples and wide ranging effects of racism will be examined in this paper.
What contributes to racism? The first thing is prejudice, which is an unjustified prejudgement about a group of people. Having a prejudice attitude, which usually tries to make one group better than another group. Prejudice exists against many groups, especially blacks and jews. Members of these groups are often stereotyped, which is an ignorant action against these people. McIntyre argues that “Prejudice is a negative and persistent judgement based on scant or incorrect information about people in a group. Prejudice involves beliefs and attitudes. More technically, we might define it this way: prejudice is a negative or hostile attitude towards a person who belongs to a group, simply because he or she have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group.” (1999 : 222) Yet, the functionalist perspective on prejudice states that prejudice must be developed, because it is necessary for solidarity, and to distinguish between groups. The second thing that contributes to racism is discrimination, which involves behavior, instead of attitudes and beliefs. Yet there is no evidence that prejudiced attitudes will become discriminatory behaviors, as Allport (1954) argues that what people actually do in relation to groups they dislike is not always directly related to what they think or feel about them. Two employers, for example, may dislike jews to an equal degree. One may keep his feelings to himself and may hire jews on the same basis of any workers– perhaps because he wants to gain goodwill for his factory or store in the Jewish community. The other may translate his dislike into his employment policy, and refuse...