Prejudice is, as the name implies, the process of "pre-judging" something. In general, it implies coming to a judgment on the subject before learning where the preponderance of the evidence actually lies.
Examples of prejudice abound in history. In most cases, a prejudiced attitude held by a dominant ethnic group against a minority or disadvantaged group within the same society results in various forms of discrimination.
The most elaborate kind of discrimination is segregation—the isolation of ethnic groups enforced by law or custom or both. Examples of segregation include the strict confinement of Jews to the ghettos of medieval European cities and the rigid race-separation laws of modern-day South Africa, but segregation can also apply to the exclusion of a member of a minority group from social clubs or from access to particular jobs or educational opportunities.
Integration, the mixing of ethnic groups, might be expected to lead to the rapid disappearance of prejudice, on the theory that prolonged contact between people should destroy stereotypes. In practice, however, prejudiced attitudes often have proved extremely difficult to eradicate, even when integration is enforced by law (Jance, 1997)
In the history of racial prejudice in the United States, statistics have been important to the dominant white culture. As long as small numbers of any one group could be confined to a certain area, and took the jobs native-born Americans and assimilated groups no longer wanted, they did not attract much attention.
A lot of research has been done on the origins of prejudice. How does it arise? To summaries the rather complex conclusions of social and psychological studies, we should distinguish between the root cause and additional causes.
The root cause must probably be sought in the need of every group of people, whether a family, a class, a religious community......
