I agree if there is negative energy it should be removed from your life or limited. Negative people bring out rhe worse in you. Positive people bring out the best in you. You take accountability by choosing who you associate with. Are there negative and positive people in each group? Probably.

Prejudice comes from past experiences. Then people notice a pattern of behavior. Then they start to associate that pattern of behavior with a certain color. Examples are: white people can't dance. Or: my bike always gets stolen by black people. This is called pattern recognition. If you walk down the street, and your neighbors are black, and every time you walk down that street and they see you, they attempt to beat you up, its stupid to say, it's prejudiced to say these black people will try and beat me up us prejudiced. No, you know they will based on past experiences. If you fear walking down the street, it's because you experienced attacks, not because of "prejudice". And you KNOW they will attack, because they attacked you every other time you walked that way, itsmot the unknown. Ignorance is thinking oh they won't attack me this time because I'm not going to assume based on past experiences that these individuals will attack me even though they did every time before. Common sense!!!!

@FocusOn1 That is not the nature of prejudice. You describe fear of individuals shown to have caused pain. If you visit another city and see a black person and fear them, that is prejudice - you don't know them, yet you treat them as if they are the same as your neighbors solely on the basis of their color. It is not prejudice against your neighbors, it is against someone you've never met before just because they look like your neighbors. You fear them because you pre-judge them.

@tracycoyle well if I have travelled to different cities and states, and every time I was physically assaulted, it just so happened to be a black person, does that make me prejudiced?

@FocusOn1 Makes you a victim of a crime. Makes me wonder why it keeps happening. I have been to the largest 20 cities in the US, I've lived in 9 states. I've traveled, as a single woman, over 400,000 miles by car (none professionally). I have slept in motels in more than 40 states, most in small towns, and I've never been assaulted except in Chicago - where I grew up. On the Southside. BTW I grew up in an area of Chicago called West Englewood. You should look it up.

Maybe, your bias is well informed - maybe your activities put you in harms way - maybe you need to learn self defense - maybe your sense of observation and awareness needs more training.

But individuals are responsible for their own actions - not the actions of their race, or religion, or sex, or nationality.

@tracycoyle apparently men get assaulted more than women.

@tracycoyle I'm not a victim, I'm a victor. Bullies look for people smaller or weaker. Or they attack in large numbers, sometimes premeditated. The police actually are supplemental bullies to the bullies. An extreme example is when those kids were getting shot in Uvalde, they were arresting parents that wanted to go in and stop the shooter. Most of the time, I would say fights aren't really investigated. People that actually defend themselves are also at risk of being arrested themselves. I guess the best thing you can do is avoid negative people. Negative people are more likely to be bullies looking for a fight. After the cop went in to stop.the shooter, Democrats were saying the cop didn't have the authority to stop the shooter.