ABSTRACT
L eaf through a daily newspaper, turn on the evening news, or log on to your favorite Internet news site and you will confront the ubiquity with which prejudices, discrimination, and intergroup conflict permeate everyday life. As we wrote this chapter, the news offered accounts of ethnic violence in Sudan, anti-discrimination lawsuits filed by overweight employees in the U.S., and inflammatory rhetoric spewing from French nationalists and Muslims over whether to allow students to wear religious head coverings in public school. Today, you may come across reports of Palestinians and Israelis again fighting in the Middle East, legislation proposed by nationalistic Germans to limit third-world immigration into their country, or religious conservatives and gay activists in the U.S. hurling nasty stereotype-laced barbs at one another over the issue of same-sex marriage.
