Is prejudice preventable

Answer 1

The original meaning of "prejudice' is the act of "pre-judging" or making judgments or opinions about something or someone before you know the truth or facts. In that sense, it seems to be human nature to make irrational judgments, and only education and life experience eventually teach a person to suspend judgment until all the facts are known and weighed rationally and fairly. Not all judgments are exactly irrational. If you saw a teenager drinking out of a beer bottle, it would be reasonable to assume he was drinking beer; but in fact he could have put a soft drink into the beer bottle just to play a joke on you. So making judgments about things takes intelligence and experience as well as fairness and reason, and all these are qualities that can be developed. The term "prejudice" has come to mean specifically being antagonistic to a person or group of people based on external traits like ethnicity or skin color. For example, because of 9/11 many people have become prejudiced against Muslims, even though they know little about Islam or the nations traditionally associated with Islam. It would seem that the only way to prevent prejudice is through education, especially from a young age, as well as through adults modeling speech and behavior free from prejudice--especially adults in positions of authority, such as parents, teachers, and religious and political leaders.