Prejudice

Everyone holds some sort of prejudice against certain group(s) of people based on their race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, age, etc to a certain degree. For some, it might be blatantly obvious. Others, if not most, might even be blind to the prejudices that they themselves possess.
Prejudice is the gathering of assumptions based on an individual’s superficial qualities (race, social class, gender, etc). It can be manifested violently through hate crimes against the opposing group, or more subtly, by verbally throwing degrading remarks at them. Prejudice is initially taught in the family; children learn from the behavior their parental units, siblings, and relatives exhibit and it becomes embedded into the perspective of the child.

According to the Hate Crime Statistics  in the U.S. in 2009, of the 4,057 victims of racially motivated hate crimes. 48.8 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offender’s bias against a race. Of the 1,575 victims of an anti-religious hate crime, 71.9 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias. Of the 1,482 victims targeted due to a sexual-orientation bias, 55.1 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-male homosexual bias. These results are staggering because it shows how far people are willing to go and hurt others in the name of prejudice.

The following picture shows how prejudice hinders us from accepting others based on their true nature, which we are rendered blind to should we allow prejudice to affect our attitudes toward society.