Social Injustice

Introduction

Social injustice is social discrimination. When some of the people in a society are deprived of their basic rights and are not given rewards and benefits from the society on an equal scale. They ultimately occupy a position of utter disrespect in a society where they live as victims of social immorality, injustice and suppression.

This paper will be discussing three types of social injustices that are, Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia; and it will be discussing the major factors that lead to these injustices. A comparison will be provided with examples in order to understand these social injustices clearly.

Racism (Racism on Trial)

Racism is the ideology of difference, which takes as its foundation the idea that (usually negative) attributes regarding behavior, intelligence, or culture are inherent within particular racial groups (Ellis, 183). This ideology is then used to justify arguments for the superiority of one racial group relative to another, which leads to the production of inequality between racial groups. The normative understanding of racism is often limited to acts of violence, malice, or economic exploitation that are motivated by racial prejudice. Examples of these types of racism are hate-based crimes, or decisions by employers not to hire workers on the basis of their race (Pulido, 69).

Race is a marker of difference among humans based on physical features such as skin color or hair color/texture. Historically, race was treated as a biological or “scientific” method of human classification, in which racial “groups” were defined by the presence or absence of particular inheritable traits. This argument was tied to failed theories such as social Darwinism—which applied Darwinian notions of competition among species to competition within the human population—and environmental determinism, which argued that particular social traits were inherent to people living in particular; places due to the environmental and climactic characteristics of each place (Ellis, 184). These theories were developed during the colonial era and were used by those in power to rationalize the exploitation or extermination of particular “racial” groups. The scientific basis for race has since been refuted, as multiple studies have shown that there is greater genetic diversity within racially defined groups than exists among those groups.

The normative understanding of racism is often limited to acts of violence, malice, or economic exploitation that are motivated by racial prejudice. Examples of these types of racism are hate-based crimes, or decisions by employers not to hire workers on the basis of their race. This narrow definition of racism does not acknowledge the informal ways in which racist ideology has been incorporated into economic, legal, educational, and other societal structures (Jackson & Penrose, 12). The following sections discuss the dominant theoretical engagements with race and racism in geography, as well as some of the methodological challenges inherent to research on race/racism issues.

Sexism (Second Sex)

Sexism is commonly considered a form of discrimination among human beings based on gender. Sexist attitudes may be manifested in some convictions, for example:

The presumed or alleged superiority of a more valuable kind than the other;

The alleged superiority or greater ...