What are you doing about your prejudices?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thread, of course was inspired by another thread asking people to list their prejudices.

Ok, you have some prejudices. You make judgments based on what you see on the outside. You formulate an opinion about someone based on how they look, speak, dress, et cetera before you get to know him or her.

So just what are you doing about them? Do you recognize that you can change your prejudices? Do you educate yourself about, for example, obesity and its causes?

If you have kids, what are you doing to ensure you don’t pass your prejudices to your children? Do you make snide comments about, for example, the overweight person walking down the street in front of or to your kids?

I’m genuinely curious. There was a poster in another thread who admitted he had prejudices but he accepted them. This struck me as so very, very odd. I’ve got a few I’m working through but I neither accept them nor learn to live with them. None of my prejudices involve hatred, but that still doesn’t make them or me any better. I see myself as a work in progress and some of that work is learning not to hold preconceived assumptions based on, for example, someone’s socioeconomic status.

2

I have a silly prejudice . . . people who can’t spell. I’m not actually sure if that counts as a prejudice or a pet peeve. Other than that, I think I’m pretty open-minded.

Something to remember though: be careful to differentiate between a predjudice (all people of :race/colour/creed: are jerks), and a dislike of a genuinely irritating or wrong behaviour of someone (that person – who happens to be of :race/colour/creed: but that’s not the issue here – is a jerk because he did this or that).

3

The key thing is to be willing to be proved wrong by the evidence.

4

nothing. i’m quite happy with them. sorry if that pisses you off! (not really sorry, actually)

Gatopescado: What a Dick!

5

I’ve done quite a lot of self-examination over the last 12 months or so; much of it provoked by stuff discussed here on the boards.

6

Until fairly recently, I had a very strong bias against Koreans. I have since taken the time to read up on Korean history and culture, and found that the more I learned about this fascinating nation and people, the less willing I was to maintain stupid generalizations. This does not remove the fact that I have encountered far more rude Korean people than nice ones (indeed, this was the source of my bias), but I’m now willing to chalk it up to bad luck rather than an ethnic prejudice.