Kryachkov 2!indd

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Английский язык для магистратуры
T
he –ism Schism
2. vigilante 
[
'v dʒ 'lænti
] — someone who illegally punishes criminals and tries to prevent crime, 
usually because they think the police are not doing this effectively.
READING 2
Read the text in detail to find out the main reasons for discrimination.
WHY WE DISCRIMINATE
(based on a post by Dr. Anthony Stringer)
As a male in this culture, one of the most embarrassing confessions I have ever had to make is 
that I’m not into sports. I am, in fact, so not into sports that until more recently I actually thought 
the Superbowl was bowling. My daughter, to my horror, likes basketball. After five years of dance 
lessons she would actually prefer me to take her to see the Atlanta Hawks instead of the Atlanta Bal-
let. I don’t know where I went wrong. Fortunately for my marriage, my wife is not into sports either. 
With the one exception of the Olympics. This year, the Winter Olympics galvanized her. Particularly 
the skating events in Nagano. I didn’t watch. At least not in the intense way that my wife did. 
But when my wife is transfixed by one Olympic event or another, I can't help but catch an im-
age or two from the television set. What I notice in those occasional, fleeting images, is not so 
much what sport is being played as the physical characteristics of the athletes. By and large, the 
Russians look like Russians, the Chinese look like Chinese, the French look like the French, the Ni-
gerians look like Nigerians. But the Americans look like everybody else in the world. That athlete 
who looks African, Jewish, or Japanese, could be from Africa, Israel, or Japan. Or they could be 
from America. For good or ill, this country has always been and will certainly always be a mongrel 
nation. The image of America once was a white male. And in many places in the world it was an 
ugly, vilified image. But that image is long gone.
We have not dealt well with our mongrel status over the years. I won't recite a litany of past and 
current prejudices, persecution and acts of discrimination; stigma and the ‘fear of the unknown’ 
have always been with us, playing a central role in dividing people, cultures and races. But I do 
want to go to the question of why there is so much friction in this place where cultures meet, 
where disparate ethnic and religious traditions rub up against each other.
Quite literally prejudice means to pre-judge or to form an opinion about something before all 
the facts are gathered. One of the earliest psychological explanations of prejudice described it as: 
“an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalisation towards a group as a whole or towards 
an individual because they are a member of that group.” The first thing that this explanation tells 
us is that prejudice is not something logical or based in fact, but rather, on a series of assumptions, 
half-truths and guesses. Secondly, it tells us is that prejudice is based on generalisation — on 
a whole host of characteristics and qualities that we assume a person has, based purely on the fact 
that he or she is a member of a particular group. 
If prejudice is an attitude, then discrimination is the manifestation of that prejudice and a stigma, 
or a ‘label’, is the result. But how does a prejudiced, negative view affect the people being stigmatised, 
and why does this lead to a label being placed on them? A great deal of prejudice is unconscious, re-
flected in the basic stereotyped assumptions that we make about others every day. These generalisa-
tions affect our behaviour and cause us to discriminate against whole sections of society. Eventually, 
large groups become ‘ghettoised’ and the people within these groups feel isolated and alone.
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