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Essay about Discrimination

Discrimination is an issue that ought to be treated with seriousness, an evil that should never be tolerated in the society at all costs. Discrimination is making judgment towards another person because of the disadvantages they have such as poverty, disability or even inferior intelligence. Discriminatory behavior may have many consequences; they may be innocuous, malevolent or benign just as stated in Discrimination, affirmative action, and equal opportunity by Becker, Stanley et al (6). Discrimination is a larger than life evil that has been experienced by many people across the globe. Unfortunately, the battle of discrimination has been going on for many centuries since time inception. Many writers have shed light on various types of discrimination but the one that has taken headlines is the racial discrimination. It is clear that sometimes people face discrimination due to their minority in numbers, having less well or seeming disadvantaged from the other dominant group. In their book, Prejudice, discrimination, and racism, Dovidio and Gaertner state that discriminations and perception of discrimination continue to be the dominant forces of minorities in the United States (2). They go further to highlight how jobs are spread across the minorities and this shows how discrimination is factored in employment opportunities (3). More often, lack of equality is what has led to discrimination. Turner states that “Equality is achieved by changing assumptions and structures that lead to discrimination” (4). Sometimes, discrimination might be indirect but it still has discriminatory effects on people and groups (Turner 5). Personally I have been a subject of discrimination in some circumstances and I know how it feels. Just as Atticus Finch puts it in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee at chapter 3, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”(30). It is a pity that even under the most favorable conditions of my own environment; I still become discriminated at some points.

Back in my high school days, actually during my admission to the first grade, I experienced discrimination that made me shed tears. I don’t know why I cried, but I think it is because I had come directly from my mother’s “warm caresses of her bosoms” and dropped into this new world full of cronies and bullies .At that time, the senior students used to hold a meeting in the dormitory the night of the reporting day of us “freshmen”. Those meetings were characterized by senior students sitting round the podium (made using our equipment boxes) and command the first grade students to introduce themselves. To me, this was a bizarre moment; I had never in my life addressed more than five people in a gathering. I had this common fear, the stage phobia. I watched my fellow first grades as they introduced themselves one by one being cheered and sometimes jeered. I couldn’t even hear what they were saying because my dreaded moment was fast approaching. I knew my shortcomings and that day I would spread them in the light for everyone to see. First, I was too tall and secondly, my accent was pathetic. I came from a region were people talked less English and pronouncing the words was like climbing a steep hill for me. When my moment came, I mastered courage and climbed on top of the “podium” waiting to be yelled at by the commanding senior students. Just as I was about to utter my name, a student shouted, “I have never seen black, this is real black”. Immediately, the whole rendezvous busted into laughter. Wait a moment! I a country of blacks I was being called black? That moment, my heart was racing and my eyes became watery. I felt like crying but could not cry because that would have been like scratching a bleeding wound. At that time, I didn’t know what discrimination was but definitely I was being secluded from my fellow first graders and being termed real black.

Definitely afterwards, the meeting continued and I said what they wanted me to say. The pain started haunting me later. A stigma developed and I felt bitter and sat. Most of the times, I kept to myself in the field yearning for the closing of school. I had missed home; I had missed those that did not know the tone of my color, not because they had no vision but because they loved me. I kept to myself and thought how it could be possible that the people of the same color would brand others black and others blacker. This was discrimination in disguise, indirect discrimination. Even the following days and months in school, my classmates and dorm mates had branded me a name. I was called a “black supremacy”. It is a funny name, isn’t it? Unfortunately for me then, that name called forth hell. I was a student but not like others, secluded alone in the corner.

I felt bad for the entirety of the trimester. It was horrible being black in blacks. I realized that discrimination was even worse among people of the same realm i.e. black race in this context. The following trimester I never went back to that school. I didn’t tell my parents why I did not want to go back because I knew it would even hurt them much more. The stigma of being blacker had overwhelmed my emotions and I could hold it anymore. It deemed better for me to transfer to a nearby school that comprised mostly of my childhood friends. People that knew me better and understood me. They that never saw me black but a brother to them. Although I was wounded psychologically, I had to run away because I could not continue that way. Today, the time that I can define what discrimination clearly, I feel even more bitter that it happened to me in my country and I have not even yet seen the real discrimination were people go to the extent of committing suicide because of it.

From that incident, I learned that discrimination is a monster not far from us but very close. It is just in our backyards and no one is safe. I was discriminated because I was blacker than those who were black. I learned that anyone can be discriminated based on many things and even things that not everyone can perceive. If you are disadvantaged in a group, the susceptibility to discriminatory powers is usually high. It pains to be discriminated and the feeling is horrifying. As Becker, Stanley et al put it, “Nothing abuses a person's sense of natural justice more than unequal treatment of equals” (5). It is very bad to be treated unequal when you truly know that you are equal to the said oppressors.

In conclusion, overtime I have noticed that discrimination can be eradicated by choices we make just as explained from economic perspective by Becker, Stanley et al(9). They state that “A rich aunt, whose maladroit social behavior makes her unacceptable as a bridge partner, may be accepted by some nieces and nephews if the cost of excluding her were reciprocal exclusion from her will”(9). In my case, if I have chosen to study in that school and give no ears to what they said about the tone of my color, they may have let me be. I could have chosen to redefine discrimination then and survive. In other words, we should not maybe get out of the discriminating world but fight it till we eradicate it.