Question

Explain the role of prejudice and racism in the creation of minority group status. Do prejudice and racism help cause minority groups status, or are they caused by minority group status ? Explain.

Answer 1

Minority groups are those who lack certain privileges that major people in that country gets also they could be less in number in that country with respect to dominant social groups in that country. And when a person belongs to a particular minority group he is given the status of that minority group.

Prejudice and racism relate to the mentality of people towards a particular group of people which prevents people of those groups from having many advantages similar to what they themselves are getting. When people have a bad mentality or sick mentality for some group of people they stop minor people from getting even basic facilities like education, health, and others. So when do that they shove those minor people to the minority status. consider an example, suppose you are pure native American, also white having European ancestry that means you are a member of the dominant cultural group. After the September 11 attacks, you have a bad opinion about Muslim people. You think all Muslim people are terrorists, so whenever you will see a Muslim guy you will want that they should not be getting services of America, they shouldn't be here in the first place. Thus you shove all Muslim people into the category of a terrorist and then they get a minority group status.

Similarly, racism plays a major role in this. The discrimination on the basis of facial features, hair, color leads to this. When people see a Niagro person, they either consider them not worthy of good facilities or they neglect them. Our history has many classical examples of this. Such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. So you see it's our mentality that plays a role of the discriminator and because of that, we behave ridiculously to other people.