Discrimination Lives Within Everyone
Discrimination is a serious issue that unfortunately rampant across the globe. It can occurs anywhere, in the office, on the roads and even in school. What is discrimination anyway? Discrimination is an act of prejudice against a person or a group because they have certain set of characteristics. It can come in many forms, such as race discrimination, gender discrimination and size discrimination. It is undeniable that some discrimination are positive but the negative and disadvantage of discrimination always overweight the positive side of discrimination.
Discrimination does not start out naturally. Look at the children around us, do they discriminate each other? No, they don't. They enjoy playing with everyone, whether they look differently or they speak differently from them. What they think is the most important is to have fun. There is no point hating other people and making themselves unhappy and upset. But, as they grow up, they learn, they observe and they start to have their own thinking. Somehow, they also inherent prejudice on certain people from their parents and people around them. They only talk to people who look like them, who speak like them. When there is someone that is physically different from them come to join them, they feel uncomfortable. Some might just ignore them, pretending that they are invisible. Some might even scold or tease them.
Malaysia is a very unique country which comprises various races and religions. The Malays, Chinese and Indians are the three main races in our country. The most commonly seen form of discrimination is racism. Racism, which is also discrimination against race had been practiced our country for many years. Although they are all live in the same nation, they have prejudice on each other. For example, some Malays may think the Chinese are greedy, some Chinese may think the Indians are dirty and some Indians may think the Malays are lazy. When there is prejudice, there is discrimination. In many companies, the employers discriminate against the skin colour. They only hire employees of certain races. In school, the young kids also start the discriminate their classmate who has his skin colour different from others. They do not start out discrimination by themselves but influenced by their parents. They follow what their parents did because they are the chip off the block.
Besides, there is also gender discrimination in our country. In the old days, the status of the women are very low and they has no rights. Women are discriminated because they are not as strong as the men. They are unable to do work that require a lots of strength. They even though that women's place is at the kitchen and they should stay at home and do the house chores. Today, although gender equality is being promoted in the community, there is still discrimination against women. Many companies do not want to employ women as their workers. They think the women are less efficient and they take more leaves compared to the men. People always say "behind every successful man, there is a woman". In this modern century, many people believe that women should stay at home and support their husbands. But why can't the men stay at home and support their wives?
Furthermore, discrimination against size is also very common in Malaysia. Everyone in this world is different and no one is perfect. But there are still people who like to discriminate someone because of their physical appearance. Whether they are thin or fat, short or tall, pretty or ugly. For example, fat people are taken as lazy and bad in sports, and short people are teased as dwarfs. Nowadays, the barbie had become the ideal of body size. Many people think women with blonde hair, small hips and flat tummy are pretty. Whereas women with thick lips, small eyes and short legs are discriminated. In fact, we should not judge a book by its cover, the inner side of a person is even more important than his appearance.
In retrospect, discrimination lives within everyone. If someone come and say that he has no discrimination against anything at all, that would be a lie. No matter how small or how big the discrimination is, what we are more concern about is how we control the urge. Beyond the skin colour, size, height, eyes colour and hair colour, we are all homo sapiens, we are the same. We should treat other people as how we treat ourselves.
