Consider the excerpt we read and your small group discussions. Have you ever felt discriminated against? Or have you witnessed someone being discriminated against? If yes, explain. How did you feel?
What do you think could or should be done to stop discrimination?
1 comment:
I, fortunately, have not really experienced much discrimination. I am lucky enough to go to Miller, where a majority of the student body is Asian like me. Maybe occasionally my friends who aren’t Chinese or something will crack a joke about, perhaps, my squinty eyes (which are the norm for me, thank you very much, and I see just fine!), but I just laugh it off. It won’t affect me unless I let it get to me, even if I do feel self-conscious for a little bit. As for watching someone being discriminated against, again, Miller does not have too much discrimination as far as I’ve seen, and as of now I can’t recall anything outside of school either.
Discrimination, it seems to me, will be a very difficult thing to suppress. There are so many types of it, from sexism and racism to being because of religious beliefs or disabled people, that it seems to me that human society may never be rid of it. It is natural for people to make assumptions, which lead to stereotypes. When these stereotypical beliefs are acted upon, it becomes discrimination, so essentially, discrimination stems from assumptions, which is something people cannot control. We can’t stop these unconscious decisions, which means we can’t stop discrimination. We could try, sure, try to get those discriminating people to understand the people they are discriminating against and to see they aren’t so much different, aren’t so inferior, but at the end of the day, people will still think those things, people will still discriminate. It’s almost a lost cause. Outlawing it or punishing people for it would be useless. You can’t change the way people think.
But then what do we do? If we transformed our society to the “utopia” out of The Giver, and everyone was the same—same level of wealth, which would get rid of economic discrimination; same social class, which would get rid of social discrimination; same religion and beliefs, which would get rid of religious discrimination… That might help, but that would be a bad type of life to live, which was why the main character of the book, Jonas, ran away with Gabriel. Jonas had been considered odd because of the light shade of his eyes which contrasted from his peers, who had darker-colored eyes, so not even that society had been entirely rid of discrimination. So that is not the answer.
What if we transformed our society into one of humans all controlled by brain chips, like in The House of the Scorpion? They were all humans with no thoughts or emotions, “eejits” with no minds or identity. Then we’d all be better off dead.
Those two books showed those scenarios were not the answer, but maybe in the future, we will find a way to get rid of discrimination for once and for all.
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