prejudice make us want to tighten up the bell curve, and bring the extremes closer to the mean– but I think the human reality is a very broad flat curve.. with extremes very far from the mean– and still part of the continuum.
Naming things is one way we enforce our prejudices.
Helen, you have spoken the truth, esp. that last sentence.
We've had many discussions on politically-incorrect names and why they are incorrect, so it isn't necessary for me to go into that here. Some of our name-calling is deliberately hurtful, and some is not. (And, incidentally, this doesn't need to be actual name-calling to be hurtful--it can be simply an association with something negative.)
Humanity is indeed a broad curve of variations. I think it would be very interesting to read (I'm not suggesting a new thread, just wondering if there have been studies done that are available) what a number of individuals define as
"normal". I'd bet money that no two would match!
I would like to add, however, that prejudice isn't
necessarily the only reason we'd like others to be like ourselves (or vice versa, more commonly, perhaps?). Fear can play a part in this, too, though I suppose fear really is at the root of prejudices, if we but admit it.
I wonder, sometimes, if we'll ever figure ourselves out:
on the one hand, we want to be "like" everybody else; yet on the other, we want recognition/rewards for some of the things that make us different from everyone else!
