Most people who tend towards prejudiced judgments make their decisions based on incomplete knowledge, or they generalize a great deal.  A person who is prejudiced against Asians because a young Asian man insulted him two years ago is generalizing that one person's actions to an entire group of people, thinking that all Asians are the same as the one who insulted him.  The African-American who despises white people because his or her father was treated poorly by whites are judging all people with white skin to be the same as the people who hurt his or her parents.  The Christian who slanders Moslems because they don't believe the same things that he or she does is judging those people based on his or her own belief system, and is not looking at them as human beings who have grown up with their own systems of belief.

There is no doubt about it:  prejudice is easy.  Developing a prejudiced perspective of the world makes virtually everything black and white, with no room at all for shades of grey.  

People are good or bad, and prejudiced people don't have to think further or learn more about anyone--their minds are already made up, and that's all there is to it.  Prejudice in some ways is a form of mental and emotional laziness, and in other ways it's a huge barrier that people use to hide behind, trying to eliminate threats to their feelings of safety and well being.

Prejudice becomes dangerous when people try to get others to share it.  I may be prejudiced against people with green skin, but as long as I keep that prejudice to myself it hurts no one but me.  Once I start to talk to my neighbor, though, and try to convince her that all green-skinned people are bad, then I'm causing harm.  And when we start talking about what we should do about the "problem" of green-skinned people, then we become truly dangerous.  In order to give ourselves credibility, we distort reality, we stretch facts, and we ignore the truth about the greenskins, just to make our case against them stronger.

At its most basic, prejudice is our willingness to believe bad about others without finding out the truth.  And my prejudice against greenskins means that I'm going to close myself off from learning from them, I'm going to deprive myself of what they have to share with me, and I'm going to live in fear of the greenskins becoming stronger than me and doing something horrible to me to pay me back for the way I feel about them.  That's no way to live a life, and by allowing my prejudices to control how I treat others, I'm dooming myself to continued ignorance and future fears.

The way to battle prejudice--in ourselves and in others--is simple.  We must educate ourselves as to the true nature of all people.  Individuals do not accurately represent any racial, religious, or cultural group, and we're taking the easy and lazy way out if we allow ourselves to define others by the actions of very few.

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