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taking a cue from my brother’s site i’ve decided to ditch the rss feeds for the day and take you on a free-wheelin’ walk through wikipedia.

after a long conversation with my brother and a friend regarding whether there was a difference between racism and prejudism, i decided i wanted to write some thoughts down and do a little light research. prejudism wasn’t actually listed in wikipedia and isn’t in the spell-checker for firefox, so i’m tempted to think that adding the -ism to prejudice isn’t actually possible and doesn’t actually exist. however, a google search of prejudism returned a wealth of information that i just ignored.<!–more–>

i’m guessing that prejudice is a pretty serious topic on wikipedia as it contains a tag warning about original research or unverified claims (meaning that someone is posting their research on wikipedia before publishing it, or they just aren’t researching at all and putting in opinions-as-fact). at any rate upon reading the first paragraph i was thoroughly disappointed in a mediocre fashion as it immediately dispelled my original assertions that prejudice was not racism, rather it was an unreasonable belief of a person before actually knowing them.

prejudice is then part of a much larger section of articles under the heading of discrimination. therefore prejudice and racism are both related to each other and to the idea of discrimination. but my essential assertion remains: prejudice is not necessarily racism, though it can be and racism is always prejudice. for example, a person may have an experience where a person of blue skin color approaches them and bites their finger. from that point the person has a prejudice in their mind against all people with blue skin, thinking that because one person with blue skin bite their finger, all blue-skinned people will bite their finger. this is not unreasonable to the bitten person, but would generally be known to be unreasonable if normal blue-skinned people were actually very timid and would not ever under any normal circumstances bite another person’s finger. the bitten person would be prejudiced against blue-skinned people up until the point where that prejudice was challenged by a non-finger-biting blue-skinned person. at that point when the bitten person realizes that not all blue-skinned people bite fingers the bitten person has a choice. they may choose to ignore the new development and continue on toward racist actions - actions based solely on a now invalidated exerience - or the person may re-evaluate their original prejudices of blue-skinned peoples and continue in a healthy mental and emotional relationship with blue-skinned people. but i digress.

in my hunger for understanding the world’s observations and understanding of prejudice i continued down to the “see also” section where the link for allophilia stood out to me.

allophilia is defined by wikipedia as the direct opposite of negative prejudices. i don’t really have any thoughtful comments about this except that the image sums up the article using only a fraction of the words as the article uses.

onward i went to see what phallocentrism was. i clicked the link with some trepidation as my gutter-mind-tendencies led me to believe that this word was based on the word phallic. i was right, but the idea is not un-appropriate for work. phallocentrism has to do with the importance of a man’s phallus when constructing meaning.

my next click took me to neologism. a neologism is a new word, like scrumtrilescent or fantabulous. although in the article they describe the more noble uses of a neologism, such as to describe new ideas or concepts that have gained new cultural importance.

port-manteaux is mentioned in this article, which is also the name of one of my girlfriend’s websites. it is not currently working, i don’t know why, but i guess i’ll have to figure it out and try and fix it.
with that i feel that this post has come full circle, so i will leave you faithful readers with this.