HMN 2024: 5 Tips to Fight Prejudice and Build a Successful Community

Often, when a family member is grappling with a personal issue, the family rallies around that individual for support. Rarely does a family turn their backs on their own, especially in a time of difficulty. Likewise, when one family member is successful, others in the family may expect additional help or support from the successful member. It is evident that people thrive in communities as they depend on one another, irrespective of any demographic characteristic.

Nobody was born to go through life alone. For one, people are meant to coexist in communities, whether as a family, as colleagues, classmates, retirees, or neighbors. This is why people resist when circumstances force them into isolation, whether as a result of health-related issues, social issues, or relational issues.

This idea of coexisting in a community is as old as the human race. Your geographical location, economic status, professional know-how, religious affiliation, social status, or out-group or in-group status does not matter. People depend on each other to function properly. That’s why no man is an island.

As important as living in communities is, sometimes conflict causes people to separate and retreat to their own corners. Conflicts are particularly common when dealing with issues of diversity. Instead of finding ways to resolve their challenges, people start criticizing each other with negative remarks based on stereotypes and prejudice. And if nothing is done to rectify the conflict, the entire community can be infected with internalized prejudice against others based on innate characteristics, including race.

These five tips can help lower the temperature and encourage individuals to focus on their mental and relational health.

1. Take care of yourself

There’s a reason the instructions on airplanes say that if there is a loss of cabin pressure and the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, you should first put your own mask on before trying to assist anyone else. It’s not a matter of selfishness but a matter of ensuring you can be in a position to help others. Taking responsibility for yourself, or self-love, is the bedrock of healthy living.

Properly loving yourself involves doing all those things that no one else can do for you: exercising, eating well, being grateful, striving for good family relationships, associating with friends that make you laugh, enjoying spending time alone, having healthy conversations with people in general, and finding a spiritual anchor. Having the best life you can puts you in the best position to help others have better lives. You can only give what you have.

To expect a community to be at peace, you must first of all be at peace with yourself; then, your peace will overflow to others. There are lots of ways to seek peace within, including practicing gratitude on a daily basis, managing stress in healthy ways, and avoiding holding grudges.

By taking care of yourself and finding inner peace, you not only become more open to others but also help others to be more comfortable with you. Instead of being reactive to differences, you can become more aware and appreciative of similarities. You start to see more of what you share in common with others.

2. Embrace similarities

By developing self-love over time, you start to intuitively see similarities in others instead of only differences. If you see yourself as a trusted human being, you will tend to project trust onto others.

Unfortunately, people who are always suspicious of others are reflecting how they see themselves. To disrupt this pattern, you must train your mind to see others as being just as honest, trustworthy, and accommodating as you see yourself—unless you get evidence to think otherwise. Most importantly, give people the benefit of the doubt as opposed to doubting before trusting.

3. Avoid a crab mentality

One way a community prevents itself from prospering is by having unhealthy competition within the group. Such internal group conflict can dwarf the progress of the community. Interestingly, individuals might be thriving on an individual basis, but as a group, the successful few are not mentoring or coaching others who are not doing so well for fear of competition. Treating success like a zero-sum game negatively affects communal growth.

To address this issue, a reorientation of the mind may be necessary. The successful few in the community should consider the impact of their conduct on the group as a whole. First, rather than seeing competition as a threat, view it as an opportunity to have a more productive and progressive community that will benefit everyone in the long run. Second, see it as another way of paying it forward, as success begets success.

4. Discuss the elephant in the room

Effective communication is a powerful tool to combat denial and hypocrisy. Sometimes, involving everybody who could be affected by a challenge could be the best way to solve the problem. However, there may be reluctance to engage in productive discussion, especially when some people are being treated as inferior by others.

Openness could help bring everyone on board. And once the issue is discussed in the open, and people become better informed, they will also become more understanding and willing to do the work.

5. Take action

One way to gauge people’s thoughts is to watch what they are doing because action is the interpreter of thoughts. After doing the internal work and recognizing the need to solve the issue of internalized prejudice, it is important to add action behind the discussion to boost morale and involvement.

There are lots of ways to make a difference: Volunteer to serve others in varied ways; make it a point to help your neighbors; assist a stranger who needs your help; serve at your community food bank; and provide warm clothes to individuals who are experiencing homelessness. Do what you can to advocate for fairness and decency in the way people are treated.

It takes members of a group working together to investigate how best to resolve issues of prejudice and discrimination. While resolving the intragroup conflict is necessary, it is also important for people first to resolve their own individual internal conflicts. There are practical ways to resolve intragroup conflict through engaging in self-love, embracing similarities, avoiding crab mentality, discussing the elephant in the room, and taking action. Once there is a clear consensus of what is expected of every community member, community growth and harmony are attainable.