Prejudices and its effect

 

In my own experience, prejudices is easily established within the society. I was grown up in a monoethnicity society that almost 90% are Chinese. Because of the homogeneity, it’s highly likely to meet friends that are from the same ethnicity. And at the same time, the crime rate of South Asians are higher than average. As a result, it’s easy for people to build up perception that many South Asians (in my hometown) are criminals and thus we should not get in touch with these people. Because of the above prejudices, I seldom communicate with South Asians even though my high school are very close to one South Asians community. Besides, I will always hold my pocket tight when I see there are some South Asians nearby. 

On the other hand, family is another environment that create prejudices. When I was a child, my parents always emphasis only people with low education level will be blue-collar workers. Although I know their rationale is to encourage me to study hard, I still brainwashed by their point of view about blue-collar workers, I always think that they are people that are lazy when they are kids. 

The above prejudices are reformed after I moved to UK. In the workplace and church, I have opportunities to meet people from various background. ’m able to listen their story and have more understanding about every person I met. During the communication with different people, I realised that it’s not reasonable to judge people based on their occupation or ethnicity. Working as a blue-collar worker not necessary because people are lazy, but that might because they have better skills and abilities in a non-office setting. After those interaction, I changed my mind and I tried to use new viewpoints to see people that are different. 3.2 After talking about my own experience about how prejudices was created in society and family setting, I’d like to further discuss the importance of helper to be aware of their difference with the helpee. As a metropolitan, London is full of people from different backgrounds and they all have their unique culture, ideas and value system. As a result, it’s not surprising that helper may have great probability to meet helpee that is very different. It’s critical for helper to be aware of their difference because the unconscious bias in helper’s mind will affect how helper treat the helpee when they have a section. For example, helper may have their own religion and thus will have some unintentional judgement towards helpee that have different sexual orientation or value about relationships. If helper is able to identify their unconscious bias and understand how their automatic serotypes works, then they can take action to create a non-judgemental environment for helpee to share their experience and difficulties. 

Take myself as an example, one of my relatives is keen on gambling and sometimes he mentioned his difficulties about living cost. Since I think gambling is a bad behaviour and do not agree with the act of earning money driven by greedy, I found that it’s difficult for me to show empathy towards his situation. In my mind, I always thought that his situation might have been improved a lot if he gave up gambling. As a result, I’m not willing to build a close relationship with him because of this kind of bias. And I’m not willing to put effort to understand his life experience.