Gwyne Dyer Essay

An identical solution for racism

Whoever has heard about racism cannot deny the fact that racism, discrimination and prejudice exist all over the world. Although it started many years ago, this phenomenon is as frequent today as it was hundreds of years ago. This essay will look about the similarities and differences on how two authors, Gwynne Dyer and Allen Abel express views about prejudice in their own respective texts, “Racism’s source” and “P is for Prejudice” where Dyer examines the roots of this horrible phenomenon, while Abel discusses the work of McGill university Dr. Frances Aboud on prejudice.

In the two texts that are being analyzed, the authors have different opinions about prejudices source. First of all, Gwynne Dyer thinks that prejudice is not innate. In fact, in his opinion, nobody is born with prejudices but people start to develop prejudices and become racist when they see that their ethnic homogeneity is changing. For instance, he explains that racism in eastern Germany and in Ireland is only a reaction of a population that has been white until recently to new ethnic changes they observe in their society. However in Allen Abel’s text, Dr. Frances Aboud researches confirm that prejudice is innate, biological and that every child is prejudiced until the age of 8 or 9 years old. As a matter of fact, this is explained by the desire of every child to belong to a group in which skin color and hair texture are important criteria to identify someone who is part of it. For example, when Dr. Aboud asked Danielle, a five years old girl, to choose between pictures of white and brown skinned people in terms of positive attributes, the young girl choosed the white character as the positive five times out of six. Dr. Aboud explains that at this age, children don’t have any hatred to other groups but they just prefer their own.

Although Gwynne Dyer’s views about the source of prejudice’s source are different from Dr. Frances Aboud’s ones, these two agree on...