“They speak a different language, they wear different clothes and even worse, they eat food I never saw before! I can’t understand them at all, so how come they are living here, disturbing my peaceful lifestyle which I lived for 20 years? I wish they would just disappear and go back to the country they originally came from.”

These are the thoughts a native citizen might think when he is faced with the unknown lifestyle of immigrants settling in the neighborhood.

Negative feelings against someone based on their membership in certain groups (such as ethnical groups) or better called prejudices have accompanied humanity since we exist. Easily established, prejudices may lead to stereotypes, a belief that associates a group of people with certain traits. Which is to say, that without checking up whether what we perceive is really truth, we assume another group of people as similar in certain aspects over a stable period of time. And those are the traits that may trigger fear, anger and hate towards them. If these negative feelings towards a group grow stronger and stronger, they can be reinforced by peers or experience that were made with a member of the group. In this state of mind, people may express their negative feelings through actions. This negative behavior directed against people because of their membership in a particular group, or mostly called discrimination, is the reason why intercultural misunderstandings and violence all over the world are strengthened.

So at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves how we can prevent the construction of discrimination. One answer would be to eliminate the whole vicious circle by stopping the development of stereotypes. The things that annoy native citizens may only be a result from wrong perception and anticipation, so they must not necessarily be accurate.
Most of the time, there is a gap between what one assumes to be right and correct and the actual behavior of the other group, which is perceived as a threat to one´s self-esteem. Unluckily, groups are too often seen as fixed entities, which promotes the exaggeration of intragroup similarity and intergroup differences.

In my opinion, governments and local authorities should try to solve the problem by encouraging Decategorization and Recategorization of thoughts. If the local citizen pays less attention on categories and intergroup boundaries but also perceives the immigrants in the neighborhood as individuals, he might recategorize his conception of groups. As this allows him to develop a less fixed sense of perception, he might still think the immigrants around the block are unpleasant, but he may start to interact with the ones living right next to him. He will gather more information about how these people really live and therefore understand what lies behind the surface.

In other words, contact between groups can be the key. Modern architects already take account for this by constructing new environments where poor and rich, immigrants and locals, black and white can live in the same neighborhood. Because of daily interaction, it is harder for prejudices to be built up. However, if we think of Farmingville in NY, where Mexican immigrants living among Americans caused many problems, contact is just the first step.

It is essential to take a look at the motivation and social structures underlying a person’s actions. And this is by no means something we should leave to authorities only, as it is us that build up stereotypes and therefore it must be us that help reducing them.
Of course, this is an enormous task and everyone must do an effort to achieve the goal of living in a world without prejudices. Just because it is difficult, however, doesn’t mean it is impossible.

by Julia Semineth