Unit 3 Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination

Overview How Did We Get There?


Ask yourself:

  • Why do we have “blind spots” when it comes to judging people?
  • How do these harden into stereotypes that often turn into prejudices?
  • Why do prejudices turn into discrimination?
Black Canadian Youth Group Discussion
Choose Your Voice
Please select one of the four videos below. They were created by FAST for the first educational program, Choose Your Voice, launched in 2005.

The password for all videos is "fast".

Bursting the Voices of Stereotyping
Voices from the Past
Voices from the Present
Choose Your Voice

Action 1 


What do you see?
Do you see a vase, or two faces looking at each other, both, or neither?


What does the following mean?

“There are none so blind as those who will not see?”

What is the lesson of this parable?

Source: David H. Freedman(2010). Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us. London: Little, Brown and Company.

The three tasks above illustrate some of the challenges we have when we try to make meaning of our world. Learn the negative consequences of treating people inhumanely.

For many people throughout human history the process has looked something like this:

Segregation Expulsion Extermination

In the case of antisemitism the philosopher Emil Fackenheim has outlined three stages of antisemitism: “You cannot live among us as Jews,” leading to forced conversions; “You cannot live among us,” leading to mass deportations; and “You cannot live.” How do these stages match the chart above?

Get ready to explore some of the psychological, sociological, and anthropological underpinnings of these horrendous acts. These underpinnings are actually the negative consequences of a natural process that begins with perceptions and moves from thoughts to actions.

Perception Judgment Action

Developing Perceptions about Our World

We usually make sense of things by organizing ideas and information we get through our senses into concepts: mental constructs or categories humans represent through words or phrases that give the grouped information a “label”. Concepts are abstractions and represent reality, but individual examples of concepts do exist. Organizing our experiences into concept groupings makes it easier to deal with them. Imagine the confusion if we could not make sense of our world?

For example there may be as many as 7.5 million distinguishable colours, but we can manage them when we group them into a dozen or so categories (Bruner, J.S. (1973) Going Beyond the Information Given, New York: Norton,). Thus concepts provide the intellectual categories or lenses through which we organize and make sense of the world. The processes of organizing our realities into concepts involve thinking and communicating on many levels.

The ability to organize people, ideas, objects, and events into concepts is important in learning. Memory of the meaning of an idea or event lasts longer than the memory of the specific event itself. Organizing knowledge into categories or concepts makes it easier to store such knowledge in long-term memory. More importantly for teachers and students, conceptual understanding makes it easier to retrieve knowledge we need: a mental filing system.

While concepts are a natural part of how we search for meaning and can be helpful in the case of organizing colors (or smells or sounds) they can get us into trouble when they are not based on facts or clear evidence. If our perceptions are not based on reality and if they are harmful to others or to ourselves, then we need to find ways to change them as should the drunk if he is to find his keys. But too often perceptions harden into judgments.

Making Judgments

We normally collect information and make a quick judgment and then seek information that supports this belief. It is more comforting to find ideas that support your belief than to grapple with those that do not. Judgments are more easily made than changed once our minds have been “made up”. This has been a survival tool throughout history. For example, if a child touches a flame and gets a burn, he or she will be very careful before doing it again.

But what if the information or stimulus is not so clear, as in the image that began this overview?

In these cases we usually make judgments based on prior knowledge and experience. And in our global world different people may make different judgments based on a similar initial perception. The following example (as well as the two charts above) comes from Morton and McBride (1977).

A farmer sees in the distance a large furry animal with four feet and a long tail in the early dawn light. The animal is eating something on the ground.

  • If the farmer is in Saskatchewan, he or she might think it is a cow or a horse.
  • If the farmer is in Tanzania in Eastern Africa, he or she might think it is a lion or a zebra.

How do you account for the different judgments?

When our judgments harden despite evidence to the contrary, they create “cognitive dissonance”. It is easier to ignore ideas that challenge our prior thinking than to struggle to change our beliefs. Researchers call this the “confirmation bias”.

Imagine if in fact a lion was in the Saskatchewan field.
How might the confirmation bias result in something bad happening if the farmer went out to milk the “cow”?

From Judgment to Stereotype


  • A person or thing that conforms to a widely held but oversimplified image of the class or type to which they belong: don’t treat anyone as a stereotype.

    Source: Oxford Dictionary

When judgments are based on misinformation, stereotypes can develop. When we unfairly apply our stereotypes to ACTIONS against groups regardless of individual differences in every group, we are “discriminating”.

Brad Galloway, former White Supremacist

From Judgment to Action

Three of the cases in this unit show how this process happens to groups of people. The cyber bullying case shows how it plays out with individuals.

Action 2 


What Have You Learned?

As you study the cases, record “blind spots”.


  • Who committed them?
  • What stereotypes are revealed?
  • What actions are taken that represent discrimination?
  • Which actions move from discrimination to segregation and beyond?

Be honest with yourself and record your own blind spots and unfair biases that you hold towards various groups—we ALL have them.

Action 3 


In a group develop a thesis (arguable statement) on current issues relating to prejudice and/or discrimination as reported in the media, focusing on Canada, the United States, or globally.