Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Human Prejudice: Gender, Race, Class and even SPECIES!!!

" The World of Humanity is like a garden and the different races are the different colored flowers that make up the garden"

This quote is a paraphrase of Baha'u'llah's (founder of the Baha'i Faith/Religion) quote on racial differences in humanity where he expatiates that our different colors of our skin are just like the red, white, blue, yellow etc petals of flowers which go to make a garden beautiful and not a representative of superiority over one another.

Mankind from time immemorial has sought these differences; race, class, sex, species and the list goes on to exert some form of superiority over individuals, a particular gender or even worse over an entire specie! First, the white race sought to exert its "racial superiority" over the blacks and "people of color' leading to years and years of affliction, maltreatment and injustice under slavery and the slave trade as we know it. Then man and by man i mean the male human being decided it could impose the same criteria or superiority over the female human being and after years of this gender prejudice we have come to realize; to a certain degree, that man and women are equal irrespective of what the physical and biological features may stipulate marked by the continuous involvement and contributions of women in politics, education, science and many disciplines previously dominated by the male gender.
Now, we encounter a different kind of prejudice; one between the human specie against all others it considers inferior or of lesser value. We have from time to time downgraded animals from beings of intrinsic value to "means to an end" our ends! We have domesticated animals for our companionship, killed scores and scores of animals in the name of scientific research and even consumed larger amounts as food sources. And as before, we seek the trivial differences like physical features, our supposedly more evolved form as justifications for our actions- since we are more evolved than then we can do with them as we please.
As a guilty partner in the consumption of humans; in reference to keeping pets and eating meat, i maintain that we as humans are not superior over any other animal species and i try to reflect that in treating my pets like i would any other human i consider a companion and most importantly not in support of use of animals as test subjects in labs.