By LIM SUE GOAN
Translated by SOONG PHUI JEE
Sin Chew Daily

Pride and Prejudice is a famous novel by British novelist Jane Austen. In the book, the leading male and female characters almost missed each other because of the former's pride and the latter's prejudice.

Similarly in real life, many examples show that personal arrogance, ignorance, mindset, value, attitude and mood are always followed by prejudice, which might evolve into extremism and eventually, lead to the outbreak of a turmoil, or even worse, a war.

A video uploaded to Youtube has been widely spread recently. In the video, a middle-aged white woman on a London subway inexplicably yelled racial epithets at a nearby Asian passenger.

US Michigan Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra's Super Bowl television advertisement was also accused of racial insensitivity, drawing calls for apology and revocation of the advertisement.

In the football world, Liverpool striker Luis Suárez was found guilty for using insulting words towards Patrice Evra of Manchester United. Meanwhile, Crown Prosecution Service announced that Chelsea and England captain John Terry would face criminal charges for his alleged racist abuse of Queen’s Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand. Fabio Capello later quit as England manager, reportedly claiming that he does not agree with the Football Association's decision to strip Terry's captain's armband.

There were also quarrels between Hong Kong and China due to prejudice. Hong Kong people have been looking down on Chinese people since the 1970s. And a hornets' nest has recently been stirred up after Peking University professor Kong Qingdong publicly called residents of the territory "dogs of British imperialists", and a group of Hong Kong residents retaliated by funding an advertisement in a newspaper calling mainlanders "locusts".

We can also find many discrimination cases caused by prejudice in Malaysia. For example, it is a kind of prejudice to think that women's driving skills are poorer than men's. The recent fracas in a fast food store and the incident involving a secondary school teacher allegedly calling six female students "prostitutes", are more or less related to prejudice.

The fast food employee who has assaulted a customer might be irritated by an action or a word, and his response might be related to his home education or mindset.

Similarly, the teacher is said to have been acting irrationally due to the students' unruliness. If the saying is true, she is not a racist. However, if it is found a deliberate abuse, stern actions must be taken to stop the spread of similar prejudice in the public domain.

Extremism can only be curbed when racial prejudice is eliminated.

Prejudice and racial discrimination against Asians are formed in the US and Europe after Asian immigrants seized employment opportunities during economic recessions, and the situations have been worsened when politicians took the opportunity to stir emotion and fish votes.

Therefore, racial prejudice has nothing to do with the level of education, but is related to environment and mentality.

To eliminate racial prejudice in Malaysia, the factors must first be eradicated, including ensuring that courses run by the Biro Tatanegara (BTN) are consistent with the 1Malaysia concept while home education should include more tolerance, instead of instilling racist thinking.

Trainings provided by employers and teaching ethics alone are not able to eliminate prejudice, since they lack the ability to manage emotions and reflect. This is also how many controversies are formed in the society.