The Concept of Prejudice

The two propellants, pragmatic and theoretical, determined the definition of the problem and the approach to its analysis. Racial prejudice reflected an error of the human mind, a cultural anachronism that was out of keeping with democratic and scientific thinking. Gunnar Myrdal encapsulated this thinking when he posed the problem as "An American Dilemma"—the parochial anachronism of racial prejudice and discrimination embedded within a society that was governed by democratic, egalitarian ideals (Myrdal 1944). Analysts assumed that all racial and ethnic groups share the same, universal human values and that racial and ethnic

hostility must be driven by misperceptions and misunderstandings that grew out of ignorance and parochialism. Allport, in his seminal work The Nature of Prejudice ([1954] 1979, 265), emphasized this reasoning with a parable:

See that man over there?
Yes.
Well, I hate him.
But you don't know him.
That's why I hate him.

From ignorance came misunderstanding, and from misunderstanding came hatred. This framework led Allport to conclude optimistically that "knowledge and acquaintance are likely to engender sounder beliefs concerning minority groups, and for this reason contribute to the reduction of prejudice" (Allport [1954] 1979, 268).

The task of progressive social reform was to eradicate parochialism and thereby to break down the walls of hostility that are a barrier to human understanding and social harmony. These themes were forcefully expressed by Marshall Field in his foreword to Deutsch and Collins' landmark study, Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment :

There are barricades in the United States restricting and confining Negroes, Mexicans, Orientals, and other segments of our population to ghettos which are as real as the walls that surrounded the Jews in Warsaw. They are intangible; they exist in the customs of society and in the minds of men . . . . The walls of custom and belief which keep Negroes segregated from whites are not only a blot on our own national, democratic ideals but they are also a serious blow to our reputation among the nations. . . . This study . . . may be of great value to those who would replace superstition with science in making up their minds about interracial housing. (Deutsch and Collins 1951, v, vi, emphasis added)

The issues that motivated the literature on racial prejudice are captured in Allport's classic definition of prejudice:

Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group. ([1954] 1979, 9)

Allport emphasized two ingredients that identify prejudice: first, definite hostility and rejection, and second, rejection based on categorical (and therefore erroneous) criteria (Allport [1954] 1979, 5). Many other definitions of prejudice have been offered in the literature, but almost all share Allport's emphasis on irrationally founded antipathy as the core of the problem (see, for example, Newcomb, Turner, and Converse 1965,

430–431; Harding et al. 1969, 3–6; Ashmore 1970; Simpson and Yinger 1972, 24; Berry and Tischler 1978, 235; Kinder and Sears 1981; Pettigrew 1982, 1–5; Dovidio and Gaertner 1986, 2–3; Marger 1994, 74–75).

Prejudice As Hostility

The concept of prejudice puts racial hostility in center stage. Whereas the significance of conflict for analysts of class relations was as a reflexive indicator of underlying structural disunity, students of racial prejudice focused on hostility as the definitional core of the problem itself. This was the form in which race relations manifested itself as an ugly social problem, and the social problem was what motivated the analysis of race relations. If there were no intergroup hostility, there would be no problem that required analysis. That spirit is illustrated in an early bulletin published by the Social Science Research Council on The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions (Williams, Jr. 1947), which was "Prepared under the direction of the Committee on Techniques for Reducing Group Hostility." The mandate of that prestigious committee has continued to dominate the agenda of research on racial attitudes (see, for example, Stephan's chapter on "Intergroup Relations" in the third edition of The Handbook of Social Psychology , 1985).

Prejudice As Blatant and Unitary

By the same token, prejudice was assumed to have a unitary character. Because prejudice was a purely expressive phenomenon (rather than a politically motivated articulation), the irrationally founded hatred on which it was based might manifest itself in a variety of modes—beliefs, feelings, social avoidance, discrimination. In the prejudiced individual, hostility would dominate all his dispositions toward the group in question or toward individuals from that group. Measurement might rely on any of these indicators, and assessment of the general extent of the problem in society could draw on any measure that reflected intergroup negativism. And because they were a product of parochialism, the personal feelings of antipathy that drove prejudice were also expected to find blatant and unsubtle expression. Prejudice was conceived as an uncontained expression of parochial negativism.

Prejudice As an Individual Phenomenon

Finally, because prejudice was divorced from the question of the economic structure of society, it was conceived as a phenomenon that resided in people's heads and therefore as a property of individuals. The way to understand the problem was to analyze the variance across individuals in expressed racial hostility and to match this with individual differences in personality (for example, the theory of the "authoritarian personality") or cultural experience (for example, the theory of "working class authoritarianism" and the "contact

theory"). As others have observed, this conception of the problem in individually based psychological terms also carried over into the analysis of ethnic relations more generally because of the prominent position occupied by the concept of prejudice in the literature on race and ethnic relations (Schermerhorn 1970, 6–8; Wilson 1973, 3–5; Wellman 1977, 20–22; Pettigrew 1980, xxxi-xxxii; Giles and Evans 1986).

Dominant Hostility and Subordinate Passivity

The hostility manifested in prejudiced attitudes has been regarded as an undesirable outcome by those who study it. This is, of course, implicit in what I have said in the preceding pages, but it deserves explicit note, because it contrasts sharply with the literature on class consciousness. Students of socioeconomic inequality have been divided as to whether they regard that phenomenon as functionally integrative or exploitative. Only the latter group have seen conflict as an integral part of the phenomenon, and they have viewed class hostility as a desirable outcome, the fuse that would tear apart the current structure of society and forge positive social change. Students of prejudice, however, have been unified in their perception of the existence of racial hostility. And because they have viewed the hostility as lodged in people's heads (rather than being driven by structurally induced differences in interests), it is viewed as an undesirable property that has damaging effects on everything that it touches, from the moral certitude of society as a whole to the reduced opportunities and self-esteem of the unfortunate target group.

Those who regarded socioeconomic inequality as the product of exploitative relations assumed hostile attitudes on the part of those above toward those below, and they eagerly sought evidence of a reciprocated hostility from those below. Marx's description of capitalist society as divided into "two great hostile camps" exudes an excitement that has never been shed in the search for hostility among the victims of exploitation in the class relationship. The development of the prejudice literature, however, reflects an overwhelming concern about the degree of hostility in the racial attitudes of the dominant group, whites. The victims, blacks, were generally regarded in passive terms. Whites constituted the most probable agents of change, in part because the locus of the problem was in the minds of whites and in part because blacks had been rendered relatively powerless by the discriminatory practices that white prejudice had installed.

Students of socioeconomic inequality viewed the lower echelons in more active terms and focused primarily on their attitudes, as indicative of either spontaneous approval of inequality or assertive decrying of the system. By contrast, students of prejudice viewed the essential energy as coming from the dominant group, whites. To the extent that blacks'

attitudes were investigated, it was primarily in passive terms, to assess the damage wrought by whites on the black psyche (see, for example, Clark and Clark's classic study of ethnic self-devaluation among black schoolchildren, [1947] 1958; and Brand, Ruiz, and Padilla 1974). Studies by Johnson (1943) and Williams, Jr. (1964) were important early exceptions that examined the racial attitudes of both whites and blacks. For most scholars, it was not until the black urban riots of the late 1960s that there was a shift in emphasis, and that shift has been only partial and gradual. Interest in blacks' racial attitudes was initially propelled by questions about the new social problem of mass black violence (for example, G. Marx 1967; Campbell and Schuman 1968), but increasingly black identity and black consciousness emerged as a legitimate field of inquiry in its own right (see, for example, Schuman and Hatchett 1974; Gurin and Epps 1975). The realization has crept into the field that a full investigation of racial attitudes requires the inclusion of blacks' as well as whites' perceptions and attitudes (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Sigelman and Welch 1991). At the same time, however, inclusion of blacks in analyses has not led to any fundamental recasting of the dynamics of racial attitudes in more politically interactive terms. The concept of prejudice has not been dislodged and the powerful core of the problem is still seen as residing with whites. Assessments of racial prejudice among whites have continued to flourish as a discrete line of inquiry (for example, Selznick and Steinberg 1969; Campbell 1971; Katz 1976; Fairchild and Gurin 1978; Pettigrew 1979; Sears, Hensler, and Speer 1979; Kinder and Sears 1981; Apostle et al. 1983; Dovidio and Gaertner 1986; Sniderman et al. 1991).