Question

Discuss how we come to discriminate against others. Provide an overview of moving from a stereotype to discrimination.

with examples please

Answer 1

There are various reasons we come to discriminate against others, some of them are:
(a) Insecurity -  we may be insecure and feel a need to tear others down as a way of raising ourselves up. We are all vulnerable to feelings of inferiority, insecurity, and inadequacy. Satan and the fallen world in which we live to make sure of that. In situations such as these, we usually either retreat or attack, and discrimination is a tool we may use to attack.

(b) Ignorance - we are created in the image of God, that God views us as equal in His eyes, that we should “do unto others as we would have others do unto us,” and that God created diversity throughout His creation, and He intends us to experience unity in the midst of diversity. If we don’t know these things, were never taught these things, or were taught the opposite, we may be more vulnerable to the temptations brought on by insecurity.

(c) Weakness - We may have grown up in a culture of discrimination. Our family, our school, our town/city may have had discrimination as a value, and though we may have known or sensed that it was wrong, we did not have the personal strength to stand against it. Peer pressure is a powerful thing.

(d) Pride -

We may find some who are different from us genuinely off-putting, and out of a sense of superiority, we look down on them. Again, this goes way beyond race. It may involve those who are mentally or physically handicapped, those who are “odd-looking”, those who are above or below us in the socio-economic ladder, those who are culturally different. And because there is a genuine aversion, we indulge our aversion and discriminate against others.


Stereotypes are the cognitive component of attitudes towards social group consisting of beliefs about what particular groups are like. Examples: All Americans have guns, Chinese always eats rice, lower class people are uneducated etc.
Whereas,
Discrimination can come in various forms: caste, creed, religion, color, linguistic, age, social class etc