While I was in Islamic Junior High School, I lived in dormitory. I have a lot of friends with different cultural-background. Some of them are from Jambi, Bogor, Padang, Bandung, Yogyakarta and etc. One of my friends is from Jambi and she has unique voice. At the first time, my friends and I thought that she was tempered girl but actually we were wrong. Just because the way she says something with stressing and different tone, not mean she is not friendly. She is so kind and humorist actually. We might give opinions before knowing something. That’s called prejudice.
I know prejudice in the last session of Humanistic class with Pak Hatim. Beside prejudice, there are stereotyping (labeling) and discrimination. In my opinion, As long as human stay living together in a world, these things might stay in our brain because everyone has many differences on culture, interest, perspective and etc. At the first time I meet someone new, my brain will automatically build thought about that person. However, it delays me to be my own self while trying to know her or him more. This condition tends to direct me for labeling someone if I get the proof for my own thought.
I realize prejudice and labeling are not good but those are inevitable. Then, I just try to reduce the possibility to do prejudice and labeling. Now, I’m a scholar of Sampoerna School of Education. There are so many people from different areas and have different religions. Lucky, there is no gap and discrimination because of differences. In fact, stereotyping is still happening. For example, Padangnese’s stereotype is stingy, Maduranese is fierce, Javanese is tender person, Sudanese is avenger and etc. And stereotyping about the tender Javanese is right if I refer to my friend, just call her Rai.
For discrimination, I have never seen it happens in my campus but it happened when I was in junior high school. As I know, the seniority absolutely exists in boarding school. Each of cohorts has their own anthem. When my friends and I sang their anthem which is adopted from Dream land’s anthem, my seniors came into my cohort dormitory in the afternoon. They brought some steels which is used for holding bed and they were “swearing” my cohort. All of my cohort members had to stay in the room and they had to hear seniors’ speech but one of my friends was allowed to go out. It happened because she got protection from her boyfriend which was my senior. It was discrimination for me, because seniors were afraid of her just because of her boyfriend.
There is some discrimination happen around me, but I cannot do anything. In my opinion, discrimination is only being vanished if there are some people who criticize it and against it. People need power to reflect others and eliminate discrimination. Looking back at Apartheid politic, it was disappear because some people confronted it.
