On Prejudice.

[guttaperk]

The idea was recently put to me that Gordon Allport's linking of prejudice and antipathy is a crucial one:

"Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group."The writer (here on LJ) felt that given that definition of prejudice, it

Comments

[skywardprodigal]

Thank you.

This is excellent food for thought.

[guttaperk]

You're welcome! :-)

[skywardprodigal]

:)

I've been teasing apart prejudice v racism and am thrilled to have this to consider as it is mad helpful.

I also linked to if from my lj.

[guttaperk]

I'm complimented that you would think so.

[jonathankorman]

For the benefit of other readers, I feel I should confess to being the author of the comment you're responding to, originally posted over here.

Let me echo skywardprodigal's thanks, both for taking the time to respond and for the insight. That's a clarifying, spot-on discrediting of Allport's definition. I had missed how “antipathy” excluded the pervasive, powerful, and destructive Rudyard Kipling school of prejudice

[guttaperk]

Thanks for your kind words

[jonathankorman]

I think we're actually in-or very close to-what a friend of mine calls “violent agreement” here.

I see I've implied an overstatement of what I meant. Yes, it would be wrong to suggest that systemic racism is independent of prejudice. My aim is to distinguish the two and get at their relationship, rather than to split them completely.

As you say, deep subtle unconscious death-of-a-thousand-cuts prejudice is an animating force driving a lot of systemic racism. And agreed, prejudice is always the ultimate root cause of systemic racism. But that thing you point to about that root being sometimes distant from the effect is the key to what I've been stumbling toward here. I believe that the common racism = prejudice + power formulation you'll find in a forum like ap_racism is misleading in those cases because it rhetorically erases that distance. That can lead to a misreading of what the prejudice in play really is. And it can also lead to too great a preöccupation with the root prejudice, which doesn't always tell you the whole story of how an

[guttaperk]

"that thing you point to about that root being sometimes distant from the effect is the key to what I've been stumbling toward here. I believe that the common racism = prejudice + power formulation you'll find in a forum like ap_racism is misleading in those cases because it rhetorically erases that distance."

The definition does not "erase" the sometimes-zero-sometimes-more distance between prejudice and systematic racism. It simply does not address it. There's nothing wrong, or misleading, about that. It's a definition, not a college course.

"As you say, deep subtle unconscious death-of-a-thousand-cuts prejudice is an animating force driving a lot of systemic racism"
Quibbling a bit, it's not so much deep or subtle, so much as it is undisclosed. It's often quite easy to see- at least for people of colour. It is only invisible to the privileged- just as sexism is generally invisible to men, or ageism is generally invisible to the young and vigourous

[littlebreeze]

shovels a few handfuls of dirt onto the coffin of her patience