Synopsis: Governments, Nationalities &
Prejudice – Book 5

Introduction: Level Set

As with each book in the series, the introduction should contain clear definitions that differentiate bias and prejudice as well as the Tree of Prejudice illustration. The remaining parts will contain the highlights of each chapter and how, together, these chapters can help the reader recognize their own levels of prejudice, potentially see the harm it is causing them and others, and provide paths for reconciliation for them and future generations.

The history of governments and nationalities has been very interesting and constructive for millions upon millions of people, but it is also laced with the strong taking advantage of the weak, rationalizing each and every injustice. Only through millenniums of physical and peaceful resistance have most conditions improved. Yet, there remains so much more room for change. The causes and ongoing remedies for these injustices are many. And through deep reflection, we will identify their evolution and discuss how, why, and where prejudice plays a role. This book and its chapters will focus on the damage caused by prejudice in governments and nationalities and demonstrate how and why it can be mitigated and eventually eradicated.

Chapter 1: The Evolution of Governments and Nationalities       

It is important to show how some of the many nationalities and governments have evolved. Also, cite the basis as to the “why” and “how” nationalities generated governments.

Chapter 2: Governmental Results and Nationalism

This chapter is intended to describe some of the numerous pieces of life evidences that support the damages and wars caused by governments and nationalism. Some of these examples must be from fairly recent events. We think by framing the actual occurrences in this chapter, it sets the stage for examining the character of the people who were the primary decision-makers in these political disasters. 

Chapter 3: Prejudice in Action

We propose examining the characters of the many people who were primarily responsible for these disasters. This examination should include highlighting the behavioral characteristics of the individuals so we can vividly see their behaviors and the results of these behaviors. From there, we should be able to easily identify characteristics (roots) of behavior that caused damaging prejudice. There is much to be said and analyzed about why there are such emotional differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S. Many of these differences are rooted in prejudice and can be mitigated.  The purpose of this chapter is not to damage individual reputations but rather to understand how these individuals’ characteristics were developed and why they behaved in the manners in which they did and/or are doing.

Chapter 4: Implicit and Explicit Costs

These prejudices have caused and are causing numerous deaths, enormous financial burdens, family disruptions, and on-going chaos. This chapter will discuss all of these with some detail. 

Chapter 5: Understanding Our Degrees of Prejudice

This chapter will include a quiz for the reader, and its purpose is twofold:

• Provide the reader with an assessment of their degree of prejudice so that, if they choose to address their issues, we will provide some mitigation tools in a later chapter.
• Potentially use the reader’s input as part of our future efforts to gather, integrate, and assimilate similar metrics for the purpose of designing and creating complementary or stop gap curriculums for our educational systems. So, optionally, we may encourage the reader to go to our website at prejudiceunfolded.org to take the quiz. In doing so, the reader’s information remains anonymous while we are able to capture the information for survey and educational purposes.

Chapter 6: Mitigation Tools

There are several mitigation tools that should be mentioned in this chapter. However, before they are offered, we will identify the multiple constructive reasons for wanting to mitigate. For example, it has been said that there are two things one should not discuss, and those are religion and politics. And one should be asking themself, “Why not?” Most likely, the reason is that it makes them feel uncomfortable. And there are many possible answers as to why, such as, the individual is unfamiliar with the information, doesn’t want to get into an argument, doesn’t want the other person(s) to know their beliefs, feels the other person is too set in their ways, feels their beliefs will be held against them, and so on.

If any of these are the reasons, then it must be understood that the person harboring these feelings has room to grow. The tools should address healthy ways in which a person should behave when faced with differences of opinion or facts they don’t believe are true. Most of us will not become experts in these types of conversations, but by making some changes within ourselves, we will become more understanding, tolerant, respectful, patient, and probably learn something we did not know previously.                

Chapter 7: Open Discussion

The intentions of this chapter are: to provide a forum for handling political conversations in constructive ways; to include how to recognize conversations headed for destruction and demonstrate what can be done to turn them into something positive; and to have all parties leave the discussion with a better understanding, respect, and tolerance for each other’s thoughts and opinions, especially when different.

Chapter 8: Survey and feedback

We may want to encourage the reader to reference our website’s survey and/or provide us with some feedback so we can use it going forward to help educate and provide tools to our youth.