Prejudice Model

I argue that difficulty in eliminating racism in society is due to the rise in underlying power based on the “prejudice model.”

Prejudice is a mental framework that protects people from fearfulness, comprising of two concepts: Ignorance and Fear. Ignorance prejudicial occurs when everyone in the society tend to have sceptical attitude towards others. Fear prejudicial is defined as the issue of losing privilege and power.

People tend to safeguard positions to their social advantage, which can be in terms of social, economic, cultural factors over others defined to be different from them, and therefore, deemed undeserving of these positions. According to Matthew Lieberman, a social psychologist, such reactions are normal due to social connections whereby people become defensive once they felt that their societal privileges has been threatened.

Ignorance prejudicial causes people to be sceptical and judgemental of other groups, their way of life and social conditions. Such prejudicial is increased when prevailing norms of separation and segregation prevent people of different ethnic groups from interacting. Prejudice is a psychological phenomenon beyond governmental control. The inflexibility and defensive racial prejudice attitudes persists even when evidence proves their attitudes wrong due to the fear of losing privilege power.

The Singapore government tries to promote racial harmony by celebrating “Racial Harmony Day” annually on 21st July since the 1964 racial riots. Inter-Racial and Religious Confidence Circles is also created to promote racial harmony in efforts to strengthen social cohesion. However, the feelings of racism still exist. Based on a survey conducted by Institute of Policy Studies, it mentioned that 16% of 4,000 Singaporeans felt that racial prejudice had grown over the years, while 46.8% felt that it had not changed (Institute of Policy Studies, 2014).

People will continue to maintain their prejudice, despite of the evidence to the contrary, if they are able to defend the power of privilege. Therefore, I argue that to eliminate racism, we need to educate the newer generations about racism and the ways to combat it to dampen the potential appeal of racism messages. According to Vox, although education is the key to eliminate racism, but is also a time-consuming process (Vox, 2017).

Words Count: 350 words (Not including in-text citations and references) #miniarguments