The Nature of Prejudice. Reading Ma Addison-wesley

The Nature of Prejudice

Featuring Material from:

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979

Framework

Homo is non born prejudiced; rather, prejudice is learned. Past its very nature, prejudice denies individual man nobility and breaks the cardinal unity among people. Gordon W. Allport defines prejudice equally a hostile attitude or feeling toward a person solely considering he or she belongs to a group to which one has assigned objectionable qualities. Allport stresses that this hostile attitude is not just a hasty prejudgment before i knows the facts. It is a judgment that resists facts and ignores truth and honesty. Thus, prejudice blinds i to the facts and creates a kind of poisonous substance in a relationship. Although prejudice in daily life is ordinarily a thing of dealing with individual people, information technology as well entails unwarranted ideas concerning a group equally a whole. Negative religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice (based on grouping past religion, nationality, or race) is an contempt based on faulty and inflexible generalization or stereotyping. Co-ordinate to Allport, information technology may be felt or expressed, and it is directed toward a grouping as a whole or toward an individual because he or she is a fellow member of that group. Religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice persists for several reasons. Prejudice gives an individual a imitation sense of identity and cocky-worth; that is, a person may discriminate against others to make himself feel more than powerful and to elevate his own self-esteem. Also, categorization and stereotyping often offering a convenient scapegoat for individual or group problems.

Prejudice, then, is generally the manner ane thinks or feels about a particular person or grouping. Discrimination is acting on that negative prejudice. Allport farther explains that negative prejudice and discrimination are expressed in escalating levels of violence. These escalating levels of bigotry move from spoken abuse to genocide in the following order:

1. Spoken Abuse (which he calls Antilocution)

two. Avoidance

3. Bigotry or Legalized (Institutionalized) Racism

4. Violence Against People and Property

5. Extermination or Genocide (the systematic attempt to destroy an unabridged people)

 Allport contends that minor forms of prejudice such as spoken abuse have a fashion of growing into more than virulent and destructive forms of discrimination and violence. In the post-obit excerpts from The Nature of Prejudice, author Gordon Allport identifies the trouble of prejudice, describes the escalating levels of violence associated with prejudice, and defines the pregnant of scapegoat in ancient and modern society.

The following excerpts have been taken from:

THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE
By Gordon W. Allport

Copyright (c) 1979, 1958, 1954.  Reprinted by permission of Perseus Books Publishers,
a fellow member of Perseus Books. L.L.C.

From: "What is the Trouble?"

For myself, earth-jump and fettered to the scene of my activities, I confess that I exercise experience the differences of mankind, national and private . . . I am, in plainer words, a packet of prejudices—made up of likings and dislikings—the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, and antipathies.

Charles Lamb

In Rhodesia a white truck driver passed a group of idle natives and muttered, "They're lazy brutes." A few hours later he saw natives heaving two-hundred pound sacks of grain onto a truck, singing in rhythm to their work. "Savages," he grumbled. "What do you expect?"

In i of the W Indies it was customary at ane time for natives to hold their noses conspicuously whenever they passed an American on the street. And in England, during the war, it was said, "The just trouble with the Yanks is that they are over-paid, over-sexed, and over here."

Smoothen people often called the Ukrainians "reptiles" to express their contempt for a group they regarded as ungrateful, revengeful, wily, and treacherous. At the same time Germans chosen their neighbors to the east "Polish cattle." The Poles retaliated with "Prussian swine"—a jibe at the presumed uncouthness and lack of accolade of the Germans.

In South Africa, the English, it is said, are against the Afrikaner; both are against the Jews; all three are opposed to the Indians; while all four conspire against the native black.

In Boston, a dignitary of the Roman Cosmic Church was driving along a lonesome road on the outskirts of the city. Seeing a small Negro male child trudging forth, the dignitary told his chauffeur to cease and requite the boy a lift. Seated together in the back of the limousine, the cleric, to brand conversation, asked, "Picayune Male child, are you a Catholic?" Broad-eyed with alert, the boy replied, "No sir, information technology's bad enough being colored without being one of those things."

Pressed to tell what Chinese people really recollect of Americans, a Chinese student reluctantly replied, "Well, we think they are the best of the foreign devils." This incident occurred before the Communist revolution in Mainland china. Today's youth in Cathay are trained to retrieve of Americans as the worst of the foreign devils.

In Hungary, the maxim is, "An anti-Semite is a person who hates the Jews more than is absolutely necessary."

No corner of the earth is free from group contemptuousness. Being fettered to our respective cultures, we, like Charles Lamb, are bundles of prejudice.

From: "Interim Out Prejudice"

What people actually do in relation to groups they dislike is non always directly related to what they remember or feel about them. 2 employers, for case, may dislike Jews to an equal degree. I may keep his feelings to himself and may hire Jews on the same basis as any workers—perhaps because he wants to gain goodwill for his factory or store in the Jewish customs. The other may translate his dislike into his employment policy, and refuse to rent Jews. Both men are prejudiced, simply only one of them practices bigotry. Equally a rule bigotry has more firsthand and serious social consequences than has prejudice.

It is true that any negative mental attitude tends somehow, somewhere, to express itself in activity. Few people keep their antipathies entirely to themselves. The more intense the mental attitude, the more than likely information technology is to result in vigorously hostile action.

We may venture to distinguish certain degrees of negative action from the least energetic to the nigh.

1. Antilocution. Nigh people who have prejudices talk about them. With like-minded friends, occasionally with strangers, they may express their antagonism freely. But many people never go beyond this mild caste of antipathetic activity.

2. Avoidance. If the prejudice is more intense, it leads the individual to avert members of the disliked group, fifty-fifty peradventure at the cost of considerable inconvenience. In this case, the bearer of prejudice does not directly inflict harm upon the group he dislikes. He takes the burden of accommodation and withdrawal entirely upon himself.

3. Discrimination. Here the prejudiced person makes detrimental distinctions of an active sort. He undertakes to exclude all members of the group in question from sure types of employment, from residential housing, political rights, educational or recreational opportunities, churches, hospitals, or from some other social privileges. Segregation is an institutionalized form of bigotry, enforced legally or by mutual custom.

4. Concrete attack. Under conditions of heightened emotion prejudice may atomic number 82 to acts of violence or semi-violence. An unwanted Negro family unit may be forcibly ejected from a neighborhood, or and then severely threatened that it leaves in fearfulness. Gravestones in Jewish cemeteries may be desecrated. The Northside's Italian gang may lie in look for the Southside'south Irish gang.

v. Extermination. Lynchings, pogroms, massacres, and the Hitlerian program of genocide mark the ultimate degree of violent expression of prejudice.

This 5-point scale is not mathematically constructed, only it serves to call attending to the enormous range of activities that may upshot from prejudiced attitudes and beliefs. While many people would never move from antilocution to abstention; or from avoidance to active discrimination, or college on the scale, nonetheless it is true that activeness on 1 level makes transition to a more intense level easier. It was Hitler's antilocution that led Germans to avoid their Jewish neighbors and erstwhile friends. This preparation made information technology easier to enact the Nürmberg laws of discrimination which, in turn, made the subsequent burning of synagogues and street attacks upon Jews seem natural. The final stride in the macabre progression was the ovens at Auschwitz.

From the betoken of view of social consequences much "polite prejudice" is harmless plenty—existence confined to idle churr. But unfortunately, the fateful progression is, in this century, growing in frequency. The resulting disruption in the homo family is menacing.  And as the peoples of the world grow e'er more than interdependent, they tin tolerate less well the mounting friction.

From: "Significant of Scapegoat"

The term scapegoat originated in the famous ritual of the Hebrews, described in the Book of Leviticus (16:20-22). On the Day of Atonement a live goat was called by lot. The high priest, robed in linen garments, laid both his hands on the goat'due south head, and confessed over information technology the iniquities of the children of Israel. The sins of the people thus symbolically transferred to the fauna, it was taken out into the wilderness and let go. The people felt purged, and for the time being, guiltless.

The blazon of thinking here involved is not uncommon. From earliest times the notion has persisted that guilt and misfortune tin be shifted from ane human's back to some other. Animistic thinking confuses what is mental with what is concrete. If a load of wood can be shifted, why not a load of sorrow or a load of guilt?

Nowadays we are probable to label this mental process projection. In other people we meet the fear, anger, lust that reside primarily in ourselves. It is not we ourselves who are responsible for our misfortunes, only other people. In our common spoken language we recognize this failing in such phrases as "whipping-boy," "taking it out on the dog," or "scapegoat."

1. 
   In your own words, define scapegoat, prejudice, racism, and genocide.
2. 
   How is prejudice learned? How is prejudice passed from one generation to another?
   

3. 
   The Nazi authorities institutionalized deep-seated prejudice against its perceived enemies of the State. How practice avoidance and isolation foster fright of the unknown? How are ignorance, fright, prejudice, discrimination, and violence linked?
4. 
   What are some examples of spoken (oral) corruption in modern American order? Who are society's "scapegoats" today?
5. 
   What is a "detest" criminal offence and how might such a crime reflect the insidious nature of prejudice?
6. 
   Using contemporary American or world history, cite an case of each of the five escalating levels of prejudice presented past psychologist Gordon Allport in his volume The Nature of Prejudice: 1) Spoken Abuse, 2) Abstention, 3) Discrimination (Legalized Racism), 4) Concrete Attack, and 5) Extermination.
   

7. 
   According to Gordon Allport, seemingly minor forms of prejudice tin abound into more virulent forms of bigotry and violence. This transition becomes fifty-fifty more than apparent upon examining the parallels between Allport'southward levels of prejudice and the escalating levels of prejudice, discrimination, and violence that occurred during the Holocaust years. Using the timeline provided in Lesson i, what are some examples of verbal abuse, avoidance, discrimination, and violence that mirror Allport's escalation theory?
8. 
   Research the showtime phase of the Holocaust (1933-1939) and increasing levels of persecution and violence instituted over the form of this menstruum. Investigate Nazi Frg's encompass of the Aryan credo and probe how the escalating nature pf such prejudice could lead to its ultimate expression in genocide.
   

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