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Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination

Prejudice defines negative preconceptions held about a group (majority or minority) and its individual members.

These attitudes are based on strong emotions and are often hard to change.

People would rather view evidence as "exceptions" rather than changing their prejudice.

Racism is a extreme form of prejudice. Mainly because it views one's own ethnic group as superior to the other's.

Discrimination involves taking action based on prejudice towards a group and its members.

Example: avoiding social contact, refusing to give them positions of authority, and blocking excess to exclusive neighborhoods.

The Functionalist Perspective

Functionalists believe the safety and stability of a society is at risk when the minorities are exploited or oppressed.

The social, political, educational, and economic costs to society are extremely high.

What are hate crimes?

However, functionalists believe that there is a positive aspect to discrimination.

Hate Crime- a criminal act that is motivated by extreme prejudice.

They believe that by having prejudice, a group creates a feeling of superiority and strengthens its members' own self-concepts.

Stereotypes

For example, in 1998, James Byrd, an African American from Texas was chained to a pick up truck and dragged to death.

A set of ideas- based on distortion, exaggeration, and oversimplification- that is applied to all members of a group.

Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was tied to a fence and beaten to death.

Stereotypes are sometimes created to justify unethical behavior against minority groups.

The Conflict Perspective

Who is targeted?

The conflict perspective says that a majority group uses prejudice and discrimination to control a minority group.

Hate crimes involve bias related to race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry.

The majority does this to increase their control over property, goods, and other resources.

Victims include African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Jews, gay men, lesbian women, and people with disabilities.

In this perspective, minorities view other minorities as competitors in their fight against the majority.

Example: A minority gaining political power in order to help its own members and ignoring other minorities' problems and issues.

The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

According to this theory, everyone learns to become prejudiced as they learn every other concept.

How does sociology interpret hate crimes?

There are two stages in learning to be prejudice.

Functionalists- might notice that members of a group are bolstering their sense of unity against a common enemy.

The first stage is the pregeneralized learning period. During this stage, children overhear racist or prejudiced comments about a group but they cannot separate people by ethnicity or race.

Conflict Theory- belief that the victim is somehow threatening the person's livelihood or self interest.

The second stage is called the total rejection stage. This is where children use physical clues to identify a race and have prejudice against it.

Labeling- people who commit hate crimes have vocabularies filled with demanding stereotypes that attempt to justify violence directed against the victims.

Man admits committing hate crime against Lesbian couple

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!

Quintas Lockett and her girlfriend were attacked by an angry mob in 2013. Lockett suffered a broken rib with bruises and cuts.

The mob took "offense" when they saw the two lesbians walking by.

Symbolic interactionists believe that language also reflects prejudice.

The couple finally got their justice when their attacker, Terry Glover, pleaded guilty for hate crime in October 2014.

This story is relevant to the section because of hate crime being committed against a minority.

In Anglo culture, words associated alongside the word "black" have negative connotations.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lesbian-hate-crime-guilty-met-20141021-story.html

Symbolism Interactionism also expresses the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy. This is an expectation that causes certain behavior in order to make that expectation reality.

So, if minorities continue being mistreated as less intelligent or less competent than the majority, the minority is most likely going to accept the limitation.

Kayla Keel

Andrew Blake

Isaiah Shaw

Jay Patel

Theories of Prejudice and Discrimination

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