Throughout our society we’ve divided genders into rules. Like women cook, clean, and shop, while men fix, work, and watch sports. “Gender inequality and discrimination persist too. Despite gender equality in intelligence scores, people tend to perceive their fathers as more intelligent than their mothers” (Exploring Psychology 546). Men are perceived as the dominant, while women remain the recessive, because they seem to be the weaker sex. In some countries women get paid less than men for the same jobs. When it comes to car insurance men are charged more because statistics say that more men get in accidents than women. Gender can make us or break us when it comes to the real world obstacles, it’s just up to us to use them.

Our world also have social inequalities, this is when people judge others by how much they make or from the environment they grew up in, resulting in discrimination and increasing prejudice. “Being a victim of discrimination can produce either self-blame or anger. Both reactions may create new grounds for prejudice through the classic blame-the-victimdynamic” (Exploring Psychology 548). This means that people in the ghetto can learn to be prejudice against others who are poor or even just hanging in that group to be gang members. Just assuming they know their type of people. I even remember a time in PE that we had a girl who was mentally retarded playing basketball and when she had the ball people would let her just run around and shoot, because they felt bad for her. So one day I took the ball and people labeled me as being rude, but I stood up to them and said, “We’re playing basketball, she’s a person not a dog. Why should we be treating her any different than you and I?” when I said that, she was happy, she told me I was her best friend, because she knew I understood. So maybe it’s not about the person, but the level of understanding a person that can segregate us.

In our society we’ve created our own ingroup and outgroup, meaning that we socially divide ourselves “through our social identities we associate ourselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with others” (549). We “mentally draw a circle that defines “us” (the ingroup) excludes “them” (the outgroup). Such group identifications typically promote an ingroup bias-a favoring of one’s own group” (549). This is kind of like high school with their cliques of jocks, nerds, asians, and so on they separate by section of the school. After being there for one day you learn the segregation of tables, hallways, and classrooms. We learned the rules and thoughts of others, self teaching stereotypes and supporting the assumption people put on our shoulders.

“Following 9/11, some outraged people lashed out at innocent Arab-Americans, about whom negative stereotypes blossomed… That year people let their prejudice express anger. When things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target, a scapegoat, for one’s anger.” (Exploring Psychology 549). I had a friend who was Muslim and her family owned a small Arabic market in Fremont, CA. one night some high school students threw rocks and other object at the store breaking their windows and some went as far as going inside the store to sabotage it. This just supports how ignorant Americans became after 9/11, blaming innocent people just for their ethnic background. People shouldn’t distribute hate on another merely for accident of birth into a culture, but by their character.

“’Fear and anger create aggression against citizens of different ethnicity or race creates racism and, in turn, new forms of terrorism…’”(Exploring Psychology 550). Throughout our country people have developed hate and only by false beliefs such as 9/11 and the war. “Evidence for this scapegoat theory of prejudice comes from high prejudice levels among economically frustrated people and from experiments in which a temporary frustration intensifies prejudice“ (Exploring Psychology 550). The people of our country have built this up from the ground up.

There’s a section in our text about prejudice I learned to understand the passage that says, “To boost our own sense of status, it helps to have others to denigrate” (Exploring Psychology 550). Which is true when u think about it. We have these stereotypes in high school where there’s a popular group, but there’s always that one girl that’s either labeled as ugly, nerdy, or outcast but is included in the group to make the others feel more confident for themselves. These are the people I’d prefer to stay away from. Prejudice is all around us, but to be included in the process of it, I’d prefer not to be.

Prejudice is a powerful thing and if used directly as a negative choice, it could cause a lot of harm. People use prejudice to lead to hate crimes and out casting people from social circles, but we all can’t let it get to us. An accident of birth into a culture, gender, or even mental state can’t make is the person we are, but its the character we develop from within. So basically the best thing to do is live life the way we want and let the positives drive us.

Every year Saum teaches almost a whole semester dedicated to a single book that many people in America are trying to ban from our society, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . “Written in a now vanished dialect” (Racism), this book “is the 4 th most banned book in schools according to Banned in the U.S.A. by Herbert N. Foerstal” (Kelly). It all started in the 1950’s when schools began desegregating; black Americans have raised objections to Huckleberry Finn and its effect on their children (Racism). “Told from the point of view of a runaway fourteen-year-old, the novel conglomerates melodramatic boyhood adventure, farcical low comedy, and pointed social satire. Yet at its center is a relationship between a white boy and an escaped slave, an association freighted with the tragedy and the possibility of American history. Despite a social order set against interracial communication and respect, Huck develops a comradeship with Jim for which he is willing ­against all he has been taught­ to risk his soul” (Racism).

“The novel remains the only one of the most taught works in high school to treat slavery, to represent a black dialect, and to have a significant role for an African American character… Add to this presence in the novel of the most powerful racial epithet in English the word appears 213 times and it is evident why Huckleberry Finn legitimately concerns African American parents sending their children into racially mixed classrooms” (Racism). Although the word is used in context to the time period people feel offended. After the first few chapters the students would notice the presence of the word numerous times, Saum will then advise his students to read Nigger, by Randall Kennedy, this book explains how the word should be described. When asked, “How do you feel about the word nigger used in Huckleberry Finn ?” he responds, “It’s a word like any other. It has a history. If we are to be educated we should check our superstitions at the door when we engage in the work of education. When Huckleberry Finn is no longer widely read we will know the idea of America is dead.” By this last statement I believe that he meant that if America is to ban Huckleberry Finn , then maybe the idea of America being “the land of the free” isn’t so free after all. As Saum begins to educate his students, he makes sure to clarify that the word isn’t used as hate speech, but as a way people talked in that time period. Saum explains that “Sam Clemens realized the ugliness of racism and wrote to expose it for what it is, a bankrupt approach to living which has outgrown its usefulness.”

“Censorship represents a tyranny over the mind, said Thomas Jefferson-a view shared by founder of our nation-and is harmful wherever it occurs. Censorship is particularly harmful in the schools because it prevents youngsters with inquiring minds from exploring the world, seeking truth and reason, stretching their intellectual capacities, and becoming critical thinkers” (Censorship). “Based on personal views, some parents wish to eliminate material depicting violence, others object to references to sexuality, others to racially-laden speech or images. Some parents oppose having their children exposed to fiction that doesn’t have a happy ending, teach a moral lesson, or provide noble role models. If these and other individual preferences were legitimate criteria for censoring materials used in school, the curriculum would narrow to including only the least controversial and probably least relevant material. It would hardly address students’ real concerns, satisfy their curiosity, or prepare them for life” (Censorship).

Censorship is also described in Ray Bradbury’s, Fahrenheit 451 . “In case you aren’t familiar with the story itself, it is about a future where all books are burned because the people have decided that knowledge brings pain. It is far better to be ignorant than knowledgeable” (Proactive). During my interview with Saum, I asked him what made him want to use Huckleberry Finn as part of his curriculum. He responded by saying, “It’s the best American book I know.” “According to Arthur Applebee the work is second only to Shakespeare in the frequency it appears in the classroom and is required in 70% of public high schools and 76% of parochial high schools” (Racism).

According to Saum, “Censorship comes from the minds; education brings minds into the light. This never-ending struggle continues. We know what happens with censorship; check out Heinrich Heine, America was founded so that, that sort of dictatorship by the ignorant may finally and eventually die”. Huckleberry Finn is a book, “an inanimate object,” but has influenced many people to speak their minds about it. Hate it, like it, Whatever, either “Since public schools and public libraries are public institutions, they are bound by obligations imposed by the First Amendment as well as may other provisions of the Constitution” (Censorship). I believe that censorship isn’t necessarily bad, but to keep people ignorant to a single word used in a book, that by the way has a non-racist message, isn’t supporting our right to freedom of speech.