Synopsis: Institutions, Sciences and Prejudice – Book 4

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. It would also be alluring to highlight some of the historical, present, and projected costs prejudice has and is causing. 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.

Chapter 1: Inclusions and Purposes

Identify institutions within categories so that it can be clear as to the different types of prejudices that are occurring. For example, the types of prejudices occurring in government, institutions, and small businesses can in many cases be different than what is occurring in science.

Chapter 2: Competing Entities

The thought here is that, very often, in order for institutions and small businesses to remain competitive, they cross the line from being competitive to behaving in ways that are immoral and prejudicial. There are many examples of this, and some should be included.

Chapter 3: Institutional Prejudice or Discrimination

We propose examining past and present institutional practices that have and are causing discrimination. This should include highlighting the behavioral characteristics of individuals within institutions 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 are causing damaging prejudice. The purpose of this chapter is not to identify individuals but rather to understand how these individuals’ characteristics became institutionalized and why they have or do behave in this manner.

Chapter 4: Understanding Our Degrees of Prejudice

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

1. 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.
2. 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 5: 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 the person 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 6: 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 7: 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.