Prejudice and discrimination Essay

Andrew Cuomo states, â€Å"I believe discrimination still exists in society and we must fight it in every form. † Discrimination and prejudices are negative manifestations, especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge, instead of bringing people together, it pushes them apart. Prejudices can be formed when a person forms its own opinion of another person or group of persons without having knowledge or facts about them. Meanwhile, discrimination is based on treating one particular group of people less favorably than others because of their skin color, gender, age, or socioeconomic status. Racism, sexism, ageism, and socioeconomic discrimination are all prejudices and types of discrimination which should be avoided. Indeed, confrontation may be one of the most effective weapons in the battle to end prejudice and discrimination because if someone forms a prejudicial idea about us, or discriminates against us, our job is to try to change their way of thinking and let them know who we are and how we really are. People should confront this type of discrimination by demonstrating a different picture of what other people have about them. For example, someone who experienced a lot of discrimination and was prejudiced by a lot of people is Melba Patillo Beals. According to Patillo’s book â€Å"Warriors Don’t Cry†, she clearly writes about the importance of being given the chance to get to know people better before judging. Additionally, she wrote about how much she wanted the white people to give her a chance to get to know her better before they judge her and make a decision wether or not she and the other eight black students were allowed to be part of Central High School. Every time in her diary Patillo wrote how painful was to hear everyday bad words and support bad treatment from the white students. All this stereotypes were so painful for Patillo, but she decided to resist them all and keep going to school to show to the white people that black people are not so different from whites. The skin color does not make people worse. Patillo wrote on her book, â€Å" Today is the first time in my life I felt equal to white people. I want more of that feeling. † (Patillo 90). All people can have more of that feeling if we all decide to stop with racism, and all kinds of discrimination. If people confronts discrimination they will show other people that we all have rights and we have to stop being prejudiced. We have to be treated equal. In the same way, Patillo’s friend, Minnijean, insisted to participate in a school event to show her talents to the white students so they might finally accept her, and stop treating her bad. This two examples of Patillo and her friend Minnijean are ways to confront prejudice and discrimination. They tried to show people that by giving others a chance to know them better, people can realize the image they had about others or the prejudice towards that person is not true. Regarding this, many things can be done in order to get to know others; reading more about different ethnicities can open the mind of a lot of people who have so close mind and who only know about their culture. This could be a good way to get to know other people, and they will have the chance to demonstrate how they really are. For example, in the essay â€Å"Don’t Misread My Signals†, by Judith Ortiz Cofer, she explains how people can stereotype others just because of their heritage, in her case, the Puerto Rican heritage. After reading her essay, people can understand better the Puerto Rican Culture and why Puerto Rican girls chose a certain type of clothes which are not necessarily sexual signals like American people think. Moreover, just because of â€Å"the myth of the Latina as a whore, domestic worker or criminal† (Ortiz), doesn’t mean that all Latinas are the same. That is only a stereotype, and discrimination toward Latinas. However, Ortiz confronts this prejudice and discrimination by writing books of poetry and novels in which she tries to change the way of thinking of her audience. She explains to the audience that the skin color, the accent, or the clothes are not good reasons to prejudice or discriminate against others. Similarly, the essay â€Å"Of My Friend Hector and My Achilles Heel† by Michael T. Kaufman, explains the same issue as the essay â€Å"Don’t Misread My Signals† (Ortiz). That it is bad to stereotype people without having a fact that the stereotype is correct. Kaufman started writing â€Å"This story is about prejudice and stupidity. My own. † By having a epiphany, Kaufman realized that he was stereotyping his friend Hector Elizondo just because he is Puerto Rican and because Hector was not in the same special class in school as Kaufman. Also, Kaufman stereotyped Hector because he always saw Hector wearing a knitted watch cap, so he deduced that Hector was probably working as a longshoreman. Kaufman stereotyped Hector just by his appearance, nationality and education level, but he didn’t try to ask Hector what was really happening in his life. Finally, Kaufman saw in the newspaper that Hector was performing in a play on Broadway, so Kaufman realized that he stereotyped his friend and prejudice him. When people realizes that they are wrong about their prejudice, is exactly the moment when they start to confront prejudice. Is the moment when they change their way of thinking. They realize that sometimes the appearances do not show the real identity of the person. That is the reason of why we need to know people better before we start judging them. People say that the first impression is very important, but they can’t rely only on their first impression because that is the moment when they start to discriminate against others. They need to know that it is important to know someone better before they start judging or stereotyping. After all, we all are human beings and we are not perfect. We all have made prejudices, or have made discriminations towards others sometime. However, this is not so dangerous if we learned the lesson from the past, and realized that discriminating is not the best way to get along with people and live peacefully. If we want to end this, we need to stop transmitting this way of thinking to the next generations. With this change, people will create a world without prejudice and with equal rights for everybody.