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I am writing this article at the backdrop of calamities that have been taking places around the globe. The South African xenophobia is one such an example. The South African unrest has caused a lot of obnoxious feeling among Africans. According to the South African media, the xenophobia had claimed seven lives. Violence against immigrants in South Africa had killed at least seven people and forced hundreds of migrants mostly from other African countries out of their homes.
900 migrants were reported to have died after the boat they were travelling with capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. The vessel 20m (70ft) long, capsized at midnight local time in Libyan waters south of the Italian island of Lampedusa. It is alleged that many of the migrants who board ships to cross the Mediterranean come from sub-Saharan Africa, often traveling for weeks or months just to get to the ships sp that they go to Europe in search of better life.
Up to 150 people were murdered by masked al-Shabaab terrorists who stormed a Kenyan university and shot and beheaded Christians. The group raided the Garissa University College campus, overwhelming guards and murdering people they suspected of being Christians.
Suicide bombers recently attacked two mosques in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, killing at least 126 people and wounding many others. Worshippers were attending noon prayers at the Badr and al-Hashoosh mosques when at least four attackers struck.
The miseries of missing 45 students in Mexico continue to haunt the Mexicans. After a student protest in Iguala in August, 2014 Mexico, dozens of young men were seen being hauled off into police vans. Then, they vanished, 45 students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college were still missing and presumed dead. Instead of finding the students, authorities investigating the missing of students, found other horrors: a string of mass graves, police working for drug cartels and government officials at the helm of a dark underworld.
All these sad stories are a result of social injustices, evil cartel and criminality in the world. Social injustice is the unkindness of a society in its dissimilarities. Pachamama.org says social injustices are prevalent throughout the globe. This complex topic occurs in many different forms and with varying degrees motivation. Social Injustice is unfairness experienced by people who are perceived to fit into one or more marginalized groups. It is a collection of shared unjust experiences. The objective of social injustice is to keep the status quo or move backwards, to a less equitable society through censorship, misinformation and media propaganda. In a socially unjust world, those in power cannot be questioned and believed to be right by default due to their might. Groups of people are deemed inferior and are expected to stay silent about what they really feel and think while stroking the ego of the dominant group.
Jim Sidaneus and Felicia Pratto cite arbitrary-set hierarchy as one that revolves around human differences. The arbitrary-set system is filled with socially constructed and highly salient groups based on characteristics such as clan, ethnicity, estate, nation, race, caste, social class, religious sect, regional grouping, or any other socially relevant group distinction that the human imagination is capable of constructing. In such systems, one group is materially and/or politically dominant over the other. Sidaneus and Pratto states that a number of brutal conflicts usually emanate from arbitrary-set hierarchies. For instance, the Holocaust, Massacres of the Kurds by Turkey in 1924, Iran in 1929 and Iraq in 1988,Massacres of East Timorese in the late 1990s,Stalin's slaughter of the Kulaks in 1929 and Massacres of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda in the late 1990s.
Therefore, as long as the world keep on entertaining any sort of social injustices, calamities in the world would continue to occur. It is often implied that inequality is the result of the unwillingness of those at the bottom to work hard and climb the ladder. It is also often implied that people were poor because they were lazy. Some countries have even abandoned any efforts aimed at helping the poor and bettering the community in preference to serve the rich in power.
It is important that the efforts are put in place to ensure that effects of social injustices are curbed before they become cancerous and disastrous. Sometime the world comes to learn about social injustices too late, in most cases when a catastrophe had swept the communities. The Rwandan massacre is such an example.
Society should devise plans that would ensure that there is equity in the distribution of wealth and a social justice is advanced at all levels. There is also need to narrow the gap between the poor and the rich.
