On Prejudice...

Prejudice, in its purist form, should be seen as the amazing Human ability that it is.

The capability to form a reasonably accurate opinion of an individual, situation, or what have you, within the split second it takes the Human mind to do so, is an amazing feat.

From just the briefest glimpse of an individual, the mind scans through all of its accumulated knowledge to form an accurate picture…based on past experience and learned knowledge…instantly identifying the individual as belonging to a certain group with all its assigned characteristics.

While Human prejudice isn't always a pretty thing, it is definitely one of the survival traits which helped us climb to the top of the food chain. It has developed over millions of years and should not be off-handily disposed off simply to fill in a P.C. checkbox.

Comments from MySpace

Awesome	Ha that's pretty cool. I bet the early humans were like "Oh God there goes a fuckin lion again...I know what his kind is like, and I don't take kindly to lions around here" Posted by Awesome on February 20, 2007 - Tuesday at 10:01 AM

	Ashley	Here is an article from apa.org that I thought you might find interesting. Racial stereotypes can speed visual processing http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan05/visual.html Posted by Ashley on March 3, 2007 - Saturday at 7:48 PM

ikeik

That is a VERY interesting article. Sad though it is...it looks like the ol' human survival instinct is fully intact. It may be wrong to realize a gun is present faster when primed with the image of a black male, but can anyone really dispute that the very process which makes that possible is a survival instinct? Whether it's right or wrong now...the ability obviously has had its place in Human evolution. I still say we shouldn't toss out millions or years worth of ability. Posted by ikeik on March 3, 2007 - Saturday at 8:01 PM