Skip to main content

Ignorance and Prejudice



Prejudice is a universal human vice. Indispire Edition 310 raises the question whether ignorance is the mother of prejudice. To a large extent, ignorance is the mother of prejudice. Or father, let us say. When we use the word mother here, isn’t there a bias?
Psychology defines prejudice as a negative attitude towards people based on their membership in a group. Prejudice prejudges people particularly on the basis of the group(s) to which they belong. For example, Muslims are communal: this is a very common prejudice today in many countries. Prejudice can often lead to violent conflicts, hate crimes and unfair treatment of people.
Ignorance is the chief cause of prejudices. Ignorance makes us categorise people too easily. Categorisation is inevitable as it helps us to organise and simplify our world. I lived in North India and the Northeast for most part of my adult life and I was labelled as ‘Madrasi’ quite often. The fact is I had nothing to do with the city that was called once upon a time Madras. I belonged to a different state altogether. I didn’t even know the language of the people of Madras. Yet I was a Madrasi for the North Indians and the people of Shillong. They just categorised me for the sake of their convenience. Most of them didn’t even bother to check how many qualities or vices I shared with other South Indians.  
I was guilty of the same error too. I imagined that all the Khasi people in Shillong shared the same qualities and vices. The Malayalis in Shillong had a particular term for the Bengalis there which presumed that all Bengalis were voracious fish-eaters.
Most people don’t bother to check whether their prejudices are based on facts. Most people are in love with the stereotypes they acquire from their society and these stereotypes create most of the prejudices. We often hear opinions such as women are sensitive, gentle and emotional while men are tough, aggressive and virulent. It’s a blatant prejudice born of a stereotype. I have come across women who are far more tough, aggressive and virulent than men and vice-versa.
We can always check the facts. That’s the way to deal with our prejudices. But who cares for facts? Look at present-day India. See how full of prejudices it is. The ruling party and its numerous accomplice-organs are doing whatever they can to foster prejudices against certain communities. Unfortunately our leaders are encouraging the popularisation of such prejudices. They even make use of the national media for cultivating and propagating prejudices against certain people.
Competition for limited resources is another cause of prejudices. India today is faced with this problem rather acutely. There’s more poverty, unemployment, and frustration in spite of all the big promises and brags that are foisted upon us time and again by eloquent speakers. Prejudices breed like viruses in such an environment.
Low self-esteem is a hotbed of prejudices. A person who does not have a healthy self-esteem is eager to belittle others. You become great by denigrating the others using prejudices. The other’s smallness becomes your bigness. If you can’t become great, then the next best (facile, I mean) option is to make your rival appear small in front of others. How often have Nehru and Gandhi suffered this fate in the last few years!

How prejudiced are you? Find out by taking the Implicit Association Test.


Comments

  1. Wow! I liked how your researched thoroughly into this.

    Loved the implicit Association test.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad you liked it. I didn't do much research. This came from the post-graduate psychology course I did some ten years ago.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...