The Persistence of Prejudice

Prejudice is ubiquitous. Our lives are rife with it. Wherever we go, we are likely to encounter it in its manifold guises. Ever ready to hand, it feeds into our proclivity to explain away the complexities, subtleties, and specificities of personality, culture, and the world at large in the name of simplification, abstraction, and generalization. Prejudice knows no social or economic boundaries. It is equally prevalent among the poor and the rich, the educated and the uneducated, the rank-and-file and the elite. Immigrant and native, tourist and anthropologist are equally vulnerable to its insidious and pernicious charms. It has no redeeming features, causing harm wherever it treads: to its object, by reducing it to a handful of — typically, undesirable — traits, thereby setting it up for contempt, ridicule, hatred, and violence; to the one who holds it, by imprisoning him within the walls of its own making, by shutting him off from reality, by filling him with ill will and, all too often, hostility toward others, thereby impoverishing and poisoning his existence and, in the worst case, turning him into a criminal.

Why does prejudice have such a strong hold on us? Why is it so persistent, so difficult — if not to say, virtually impossible — to eradicate?

Many an attempt has been made at explaining the persistence of prejudice in etiological, psychological, behavioral, and socio-historical terms. An extensive body of knowledge on prejudice in its many forms has been amassed predicated on such questions as: How does prejudice come into being and under what conditions? Which individuals or groups hold what kinds of prejudice, and to what extent can the incidence of prejudice be said to be a function of education, economic status, socialization, acculturation, as well as historical and political pressures and constraints? What are the emotional and psychological springs of prejudice, and what needs does it fulfill for the individual or the group?

One would think that with this body of knowledge concerning the conditions and manifestations of prejudice in hand we would be further along on the arduous road to its demise. Yet if we look around us, we cannot fail to observe that prejudice is rampant. Thus, it would seem that, at best, a tenuous — if not wholly fortuitous — connection can plausibly be established between understanding, or presuming to understand, the individual and collective origins as well as the psychological and socio-historical conditions of prejudice and the rate of its de facto decline. Often, the same people who presume to understand so well the underlying conditions of others' prejudice (and ought thus a fortiori to be able to apply this knowledge to themselves) tend to be blind to their own bigotry. Often, the ostensible overcoming of prejudice on the part of members of one group against members of another group will be accompanied by the rise among members of the same group of similar prejudice directed elsewhere. Often, the same people who oppose prejudice in one context will themselves act prejudicially in another. In other words, prejudice tends to get displaced rather than disappear. Concomitantly, the possession of pertinent facts or data doesn't entail the demise of prejudice either. For instance, knowing that the majority of contemporary Germans do not subscribe to National Socialist ideology has not made the prejudice go away among some that 'deep down' Germans 'somehow' continue to be Nazis.

Why is this? Could it be that something about prejudice has escaped traditional approaches to it? Something that needs to be accounted for first if we want more fully to grasp the staying power of prejudice, which, in turn, is a precondition for reining it in and, ideally, overcoming it? My answer is yes. And this 'something' is, I believe, nothing less than the very meaning of 'prejudice' at its most basic level — at the level of its 'molecular' structure, its 'DNA', as it were — which, as I shall demonstrate, turns out to be much more complex and intricate than both dictionary and common knowledge would allow for, and which holds the key to understanding what makes prejudice so persistent and tenacious in its very essence, and where and how best to begin tackling it with a view to rendering it powerless.

The 'Pickler Incident'

Last year, I traveled to Germany under the auspices of the US Consulate General in connection with a short book I had published entitled 17 Prejudices That We Germans Hold Against America and Americans and That Can't Quite Be True. I had been invited to deliver several public lectures on the subject of my book at various local academic institutions and give a workshop at the US Consulate General in Düsseldorf, Germany, geared specifically toward US and German consular officials, politicians, and cultural representatives at large on how productively to deal with and avoid the pitfalls of cultural and ethnic prejudice.

I began the workshop by playing a YouTube clip of an episode of the FOX network game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, in which twenty-two-year-old country-pop singer-songwriter Kelly Pickler is asked to tackle the third-grade world geography question: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?" As Pickler throws her hands up in the air in dismay and disbelief and Nathan, her fifth-grade fellow player, locks in with what will turn out to be the correct answer to the question, a jovial murmur ripples through the group of about fifteen workshop participants gathered around the long conference table. The murmur builds into a forceful chuckle as Pickler turns to Jeff Foxworthy, the show host, and announces with a languid Southern drawl, "This might be a stupid question ...," swells into hearty laughter at Foxworthy's retort, "I'm guessing it's probably gonna be," and bursts into full-blown guffawing at Pickler's actual question-cum-confession: "But, like, I thought Europe was a country!?" From here on to the end of the four-minute clip, the room is swept away on a rollercoaster ride of comic relief through the peaks and troughs of Pickler's display of blissful ignorance: "Budas ... Budapest ... I've never even heard of that! I know that they speak French there, don't they? Like, I wanna say, is France a country? I don't know what I'm doing!" And when, toward the end of the clip, upon being told by the show host that "the right answer is Hungary," Pickler blurts out, "Hungry? That's a country? Now, I've heard of Turkey!," the workshop participants are in stitches.

As I log off and close my laptop, the laughter subsides, giving way to what appears to be an awkward, tense silence — as if there were something shameful about giving free rein to one's limbic self at the expense of a blond twenty-two-year-old American pop star in this particular, culturally diverse setting.

In order to initiate a dialogue on what just...