What Is Prejudice In The Past And Present

Powered by

Running head: PREJUDICE
1
Prejudice and Discrimination in the Past and Present
Kieley Hines
Wilmington University

PREJUDICE
2
Prejudice and Discrimination in the Past and Present
Throughout history, there have been incidents of prejudice and/or discrimination against many religious, racial, or minority groups. These incidents have occurred out of hatred or fear of another group. Adolf Hitler used the justification that “the Germans were racially superior and that the Jews, deemed ‘inferior’, were an alien threat to the so called German racial community”
(“Introduction to the Holocaust”, n.d.). Dylann Roof stated “…you’ve raped our women, and now you are taking over our country…I have to do what I have to do” (Ellis, R., Payne,
In 1938, people were killed in the middle of the street. In 2015, a group of people were killed in their place of worship. These events could have been prevented with education and less hate.
Prejudice and discrimination have plagued the world in different ways, but in 1938 and 2015 that discrimination took lives.
The night of November 9, 1938 will be remembered by many as Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass. This was an event of prejudice where people of the Jewish community in
Berlin, Germany not only lost houses, synagogues, and religious artifacts but also lives.
“Approximately seven thousand and five hundred Jewish owned businesses, homes, and schools were plundered and ninety-one Jews murdered. As well as thirty thousand Jewish men arrested and send to concentration camps” (“Kristallnacht”, n.d.). What brought on this horrific forty- eight-hour period? On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan was distraught about being separated from his family due to discrimination against the Jewish people, and in turn assassinated the German foreign official Ernst vom Roth.
(ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/Kristallnacht).
Young Herschel “did not have a valid
This event, unfortunately, is not the only one to happen throughout history where innocent people were murdered out of fear and hate.
Let us fast forward into the year 2015. In a historic black church in Charleston, South
Carolina in the United States, a white man open fired during a prayer meeting he was attending
(“Deadly shooting at S.C. church sparks manhunt”, 2015). This young man’s name is Dylann
Roof. Dylann chose to carry out an act of prejudice that ended in death for nine people (“Deadly shooting at S.C. church sparks manhunt”, 2015). Roof openly stated that he had to kill these innocent church goers. While he did let a few live, he murdered nine others because of their color, as if they were inferior to him due to their race. Does this justification sound familiar?
These incidents of prejudice are extreme, but both were caused with a similar premise.
The premise that hate can turn to prejudice and result in horrific acts against minority or racial groups that others see as inferior. These incidents are a key example of how a misconception brought on by society can turn deadly. The misconception about the Jewish being inferior