Prejudice

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Recommended: Social and cultural influences on personal identity

For this oral history paper I was very excited to find someone with a quite interesting and culturally diverse family background that I think would contribute a lot to the topic of prejudice and stereotype. This paper will discuss the views of stereotype and prejudice of my interviewee and also how the two factors have affected her life. Brown (1995) defines prejudice as a negative attitude, emotion, or behavior towards members of a group as a result of their membership of that group. This negative attitude, emotion, or behavior that we project toward members of a particular group is influenced by the attitudes of others around us and the norms of our ingroup. In this paper I would try to use the interviewee’s stories which in many instances are filled with treatments of prejudices and stereotypes coming from herself and others.
The person I interview is FDG, a 23 year-old female college student with a Motion Picture/Movie Production at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. FDG was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her father is Indonesian and her mother is from Turkmenistan (formerly part of the Soviet Union). Her father comes from a very religious (Moslem) family in Sumatra and it was quite a horror to his family when he decided to marry a foreign Jewish girl (her mother then converted to Islam when FDG was 7 years old). FDG comes from a very comfortable economic background, both her parents are chemical engineers. FDG said that she grew up in a very sheltered environment where almost every she needed were provided for.
As a child of a mixed raced couple, FDG becomes a member of the minority group in the country she was living in where most couples come from similar economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. FDG now acknowledges that during her childhood and adolescence she had encountered and experienced stereotyping and prejudice.
Because Russian is her first language, in kindergarten she was teased by her friends for not being able to speak Indonesian fluently and looking different than the others. “I’ve always hated my blonde hair,” says FDG, “one time a friend accused me of being an albino Indonesian… I guess he couldn’t accept the fact that I had a Russian mother with blonde her too!” In the 4th grade she got into a fight and punched a classmate after he yelled, “Go back to where you belong… you Russian terrorist!” FDG remarks that looking ba...

... middle of paper ...

... being categorized in the Chinese group. FDG knows what it feels like to be prejudiced against, without realizing it she still cannot help from being a prejudiced person herself towards certain members of one group (Chinese Indonesians). Like many of other native Indonesians, she also has adopted some prejudiced views against Chinese Indonesians. When I ask FDG if she realizes that she is treating this particular group with the same stereotypes and prejudices that she was treated with while she was living in Indonesia, she says yes. FDG said that she acknowledges it but later on comments that she cannot help but be influenced by the perception of the majority.
Although FDG may always encounter prejudices and stereotypes in the future, she now know that it is important to get to know a person based on their intelligence and not by their ethnic backgrounds. Now that she is living in a more “international” environment such as San Francisco, I think FDG is now able to broaden her perception towards prejudices and stereotypes and hopefully she will finally come to terms with her own diverse heritage and not have negative perceptions regarding others that are different from herself.

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