Rajesh lives in Paliyad, a village in India. Like other untouchables, he has to walk 15 minutes to carry water to his family's home. "We're not allowed to use the taps in the village that the upper castes use," he explains. When he was in school, Rajesh and his friends could not even touch the football that the other children played soccer with. "We played with stones instead," he says.
"I sense that people hate me, but I don't know why," says Christina, a teenager from Asia who lives in Europe. "It's very frustrating," she adds. "I usually react by isolating myself, but that doesn't help either."
Rajesh and Christina are victims of prejudice and they are not alone. "Hundreds of millions of human beings continue to suffer today from racism, discrimination, xenophobia and exclusion," explains Koichiro MATSUURA, director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). "Such dehumanising practices, fed by ignorance and prejudice, have triggered internal strife in many countries and brought immense human suffering."
If you belong to a minority group, you might find that people avoid you, give you hostile glances, or make disparaging remarks about your culture. Employment opportunities may be scarce unless you accept menial work that nobody else wants. Perhaps it is hard to get suitable housing. Your children might feel isolated and rejected by classmates at school.
Worse still, prejudice can incite people to violence or even to murder. Indeed, the pages of history are filled with horrowing examples of the violence that prejudice can sprawl – Including massacres, genocides, and so-called ethnic cleansings.
"Once the fire of prejudice is set ablaze, it can smolder for centuries. In the mid – 20th century, Adolf HITLER fanned the flames of anti – Semitism by blaming the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I. At the end of World War II, Rudolf HOESS – the Nazi commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp – admitted : "Our military and ideological training took for granted that we had to protect Germany from the Jews." In order to "protect Germany," Hoess supervised the extermination of some 2,000,000 people, most of them Jew.
Sadly, as further decades have passed, atrocities have not ended. In 1994, for example, tribal hatred erupted in Central Africa between the Tutsi and Hutu, leaving at least half a million people dead. "There were no sanctuaries," reported TIME magazine. "Blood flowed down the aisles of churches where many sought refuge... The fighting was hand to hand, intimate and unspeakable, a kind of bloodlust that left those who managed to escape it hollow eyed and mute." Even children were not spared the horrifying violence. "Rwanda is a tiny place," commented one citizen "But we have all the hatred in the world."
Awake ! September 8, 2004 pp 3-5