Dear Anita

People tend to be prejudiced or discriminate against different races, ethnicities or genders when they don’t understand things from their perspective and it sometimes comes from roots of fear. One factor of prejudice and discrimination is power, people who often are powerful might fear someone taking their status so they try to belittle people to assure a more authoritative role. I feel this happens in dictatorships and totalitarian regimes. The people in power are fearful that the people they rule might overpower them so they take away their access to media (or they heavily censor their media). By invoking fear in people, those in power will keep them in tune following the rules set for them. I’ve recently been reading the news about the protests in China and a journalist was captured and beaten. People were tired of being restricted in their travels as the government tried to stop covid spreads. They were protesting about President Xi Jinping isolating them and not allowing them freedom to explore the outside world. President Xi Jinping holds total power in China and there’s security cameras watching citizens who try to defame China’s President and if they are serious enough then the government locks them away. When one person holds all the power in a country, they can make laws and regulations and others are in the minority.

The minorities are often small groups within a nation or they don’t have as much power as the person in charge so they’re often hurt and discriminated against. Media and news play a role in making discrimination more prominent too. Every time there’s a news about a black person killing someone it’s often the head of the news. The media can be selective about what order they feature stories in which makes them stick in people’s minds longer and leads to more fear and racism against blacks. However, overall blacks and other races have relatively equal crime rates when comparing things worldwide.

I feel like discrimination and prejudice comes from what people are taught to believe by the media, how they grew up or corrupt leaders. There’s social discrimination too in the workplace where women earn less than men and they are more likely to be harassed in the workplace.

I feel a lot of the discrimination and prejudice comes from not understanding different perspectives and cultures which is why having social studies in middle schools into college can be helpful teaching people about geography and different cultures.