Isabel Licona Klein Mrs. Sciacca Honors English I 15 April 2024 Every day, people are singled out because of their race, religion, gender, sexual identity, political beliefs or general beliefs about the world. This is called discrimination and is often accompanied by the heavy prejudice of one or more individuals. Prejudice is an opinion that someone makes upon someone else based on their own opinions, using no other outside facts or research. Romeo and Juliet depicts prejudice through the Montague and Capulet families and their seemingly never-ending feud. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare establishes that preconceived notions can distort reality through a pernicious division between the Montague and Capulet families to show the destructive …show more content…
Parents and role models play a significant role in child development and therefore are figures of strong adolescent influence. For that reason, a chain reaction of beliefs is pushed down generation to generation as children continue to grow and pass similar ideas through the next of kin. This can easily cause misinformation, since ideas from the past may not apply to the present. Similarly, racist views can develop from the beliefs or environment surrounding an individual as an adolescent. People with prejudice can also "[conclude] about a certain type of person, “He’s unfair,” without ever actually testing that conclusion against reality.”(Goleman). Rascist individuals use knowledge that they gain while growing up to decide ideology rather than doing outside research—absent environmental interferences—to discover their beliefs. Thus, what seems like a small “seed of a bias”(Goleman) planted by the environments of adolescents eventually grows into doubtless prejudice. Moreover, these instances reveal how prejudice is often formed from ignorance and “can lead to hate crimes—-harassment or violence against someone because of his or her membership in a certain