Discrimination In Gordon Allport's The Language Of Prejudice

Discrimination is a huge part of our society and it has been for a long time now. If we wanted to, we could set our minds on stopping discrimination and the world will be a much better place. There is a large amount of different types of discriminations: there is interracial, race, sex, disability discrimination and many more. Discrimination is the unfair and unequal treatment among human beings for certain reasons. Ethnic discrimination is unequal treatment between people who are from different ethnicity or nationality. We are the human race, no matter what ethnicity we are, we all look pretty much the same on the inside but what makes us unique is the outside. In Gordon Allport’s “The Language of Prejudice,” he explains giving a person a certain primary label distracts us from concrete reality, to see the person for who he/she actually is (325). Allport studied philosophy, economics and psychology. Allport’s main message in his writing states “Most people are unaware of this basic law of language – that every label applied to a given person refers properly only to one aspect of his nature” (325). No matter how plain or small the label might be, it can still be considered a

Birk and Genevieve B. Birk discuss how our way with words can put a huge effect on people just by either saying it a certain way or adding emphasis to the word itself. As Birk and Birk points out, words that are extremely charged to one person can be less charged to another person (230). Adding affect to a word when describing someone’s ethnicity, people can easily take it as rude or as a joke. If a Caucasian person calls another Caucasian person the n word, to them it is a friendly gesture, but to an African American it can be harsh. Miscommunication often occurs when using slanted or charged language because nowadays one word can have different meanings (230). Ethnic discrimination plays a huge role in Birk and Birk