Personal Experiences with Bias and Prejudice
Prejudice is an intuited feeling towards an individual or group member based solely on their membership in a group. The word is commonly used to refer to preconceived, usually negative, attitudes towards people or a person due to their sex, gender, beliefs, values, social status, age, religion, orientation, race or ethnicity, language, nationality, appearance, occupation or other personal characteristics. Bias is the act of supporting or opposing a particular person or thing brought about by personal views and consequently affects the overall judgment.
I was a domestic worker in Brazil, a black woman working in Bahia where slavery is not relegated to the dust of history. I was born and raised into a family of impoverished rural workers with no education. Balancing work and school was not an easy thing, and i had to drop out to pick work at the age of fourteen. At work, i would get mistreated and harassed for merely breaking an item and often called crazy and monkey. The physical and psychological harassment in the household where i worked was exacerbated by sexual violence by the young men and to top it all off, i would go unpaid. Without any consent from my relatives in Bahia, i was taken to Sao Paulo to work at the age of fourteen. After returning from Sao Paulo, my relatives pulled strings, and i managed to complete and graduate primary school. I was enrolled in a private high school, which was not easily affordable because no public high schools would take me in. Being a black student in the private school, i remember the way i was treated as a separate race during my first day and days that followed. The other students looked at me as if i was a stranger and they would whisper to each other that i was living in filthy and dirty neighbourhoods. The rate of humiliation was so high that i got marginalized in the classroom and had to sit in a separate row. They did everything on purpose, and they were not bothered either concerned by what i was going through. They would even crack racist jokes about indigenous and black people.
I was walking home one day, and a young kid on a trampoline in the backyard of one of the houses started hauling racial slurs against me. However, the thing that stuck in my mind was that his parents and their friends did not react as i would have thought. They did not stop him, and i just stood there, staring at them, in a bid to see if they were going to do something. It made me aware that I needed to be prepared in any circumstance in case I heard something that would annoy me and that I needed to be in control of my reactions.
Another experience i underwent was during the holidays when i visited a cafe, but the security guard would not let me in. He argued that some African guys had visited the cafe a while ago and there was a fight. I tried to fight my way in, even called the manager, but my efforts hit a dead end, and they would not let me in at all. I was so depressed that i started wondering why i was born black. I walked away, knowing there was no point of getting aggressive bearing in mind they would not change. It was quite an offensive experience.
This was my life until I learned about domestic workers meetings and racially abused people fighting for their rights on the radio. I attended one of the meetings and thus began to evolve from a suffering young woman with low confidence to a participant in the struggle for black rights, women, children and domestic workers.
In conclusion, prejudice and bias occur in the general population and among professionals in different fields that lead to discrimination. We cannot, therefore, eradicate prejudice and bias from our society by passing legislation to put an end to it. People should be made aware of the inconsistencies in their own beliefs, create awareness for social norms that discourage prejudice and bias.