A Question of Prejudice

Special Blog Entry, MLK Day/Inauguration Day 2025

Prejudice is a hasty or unreflective generalization about a group of people. It seems to me to be a deeply misunderstood thing, and what I have to say about it is probably controversial. Prejudice is often confused with, or lumped in with, other kinds of things: discrimination, for one; but also racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, stereotyping, and a host of other concepts that don’t all mean the same thing. I’m going to focus here on prejudice and how it’s related to discrimination.

Many folks seem to think prejudice is a learned behavior. I disagree. For most of the history of the human species, people lived in small bands, maybe 100 or 150 strong. Encountering a human who wasn’t part of your group could be dangerous—for you as well as the rest of your group. A tendency to mistrust people who are outsiders, even if you don’t know much about them, is something that has survival value at certain times and places. It’s not entirely learned behavior; it’s like a reflex, an instinct. We’re all prone to prejudice; and this makes us quick to make judgements about people and about groups, particularly people and groups that are “strangers” to us. Prejudice is something we’re wired for and must imperfectly unlearn, not the other way around. Not only does this explanation make more biosocial sense, but it also helps to explain why a lot of well-intentioned efforts to correct for bias don’t work.

The first step to addressing prejudice, based on this approach, would be to recognize why prejudice isn’t rational or practical. Prejudice is irrational because rests on two kinds of flawed reasoning: overgeneralization, an assumption about a group based on a limited amount of information; and the ecological fallacy, which assumes that because something happens more often within a group, that it must be true for any individual from that group. The news is full of stories about crime and violence; sometimes these stories have the effect of reinforcing prejudices, whether they are meant to or not. One violent person from one group, or one bad weekend in one city, does not a meaningful statistical trend make. And average differences between groups don’t necessarily say anything about an individual from a group.

Prejudice is also impractical in an increasingly complicated post-industrial global civilization. Because human beings are more and more connected together, work is more and more about communication; and it’s necessary to be able to work effectively with more and more people who are more and more different from you. That hasn’t always been true, and it’s not necessarily true for everyone to the same degree, which creates cultural and political challenges, but it does offer a solid practical reason why prejudice more and more tends to create new problems in such a society rather than offering solutions.

The solution, obviously, is to reflect on prejudices and where they come from; as well as why we hold them and why they don’t make sense. Part of this is soul-searching. Recognizing that I hold a prejudice and asking: how can I know this is typical? And why should I expect this to be true of this one person based on my perception of the group they’re part of? Once you start down that path it becomes possible to start authentically thinking for yourself, to unwind those stubborn tendencies to draw big conclusions about other people based on little evidence. It’s empowering and freeing. It also makes you more effective at working with people who are different from you.

This is not a purely cognitive exercise; but often involves getting to know and working alongside people who are different, visiting new places, and other sorts of activities that tend to erode prejudice. Some of these activities, like traveling to a new place or going to college, are immersive, putting a person in direct contact with others who are different. These things of course take time and cost money; and aren’t available to everyone to the same degree, which is another reason for the cultural and political division right now. The people who have access to them on average will tend to be less prejudiced, less likely to make unreflective generalizations about other people, because they’ve encountered a larger and more diverse chunk of the overall human species.

As I’ve stressed in past writings, and it’s worth repeating: no one in college is “brainwashing” anyone, partly because brainwashing is mostly not a real thing to begin with; and partly because if we professors had the ability to brainwash students, we would start by using that power to make them read the syllabus, consistently show up to class, and turn their work in on time. If we cannot even consistently do that, even with great effort, how is it that we could force them to believe in lockstep with some predefined agenda? I went to college for almost 12 years and have now taught for over 10; and can tell you that scholars are some of the most prickly, contrarian, least herd-able humans you will ever meet.

Of course, as we bourgeois liberals come to live and work and play in different social and cultural environments, we develop new prejudices of our own. I reflect on the ways that going to college, traveling to numerous other states and even a few other countries; and making two cross-country moves, has changed me. I recently wrote about how an unreasonable fear of people who don’t get these opportunities is part of why the often-well-heeled and well-intentioned base of the Democratic party is increasingly out of touch with the lived experience of the United States; and how I think that cost them the 2024 election. Because if I’m going to preach that people should examine their prejudices, I should examine my own, because I still have them, and so do you; and they’re still irrational overgeneralizations that divide me from others and are counterproductive, regardless of who holds them. They just changed as I made my way from a working-poor dishwasher to a blue-collar contractor in Texas to an upper-middle-class tenured professor in Minnesota. Prejudice is something everyone has, but also something that can be imperfectly overcome with effort, education, and exposure to the new and different. No one does this perfectly.

Fortunately, prejudice isn’t the same thing as discrimination. And discrimination is something people can take part in even if they don’t have the underlying prejudices that would be expected to go with it. As sociologist Robert K. Merton has famously pointed out, per the visual for this blog entry, it’s possible to have one without the other. A person who is both not prejudiced and does not discriminate is for Merton an “all-weather liberal.” I don’t think this person exists, and I also don’t think Merton should have assumed liberal is the opposite of bigot (because, again, we liberals have prejudices too). I would suggest, then, that these are people who are willing to resist discrimination and examine their prejudices.

On the other hand, an “active bigot” is prejudiced and discriminates. They don’t just see strangers, “the other,” with suspicion or fear; they’re ready to act on that suspicion and fear; and have a desire to do so. I am assuming those who belong in this category are unwilling to examine their prejudices; and are willing to actively discriminate whether it’s socially acceptable to do so or not. I think there is a danger of creating an “other” if one is not careful with this type of category, defining people in…well…prejudicial terms. But it’s worth noting that standing up to bullies isn’t the same as being one.

To me, the people who are often the most interesting—and potentially dangerous—are the ones in the other two groups. A person who is prejudiced, but does not discriminate, is for Merton a “timid bigot.” Again, challenging some of the assumptions about prejudice, I would suggest this is a person who is unwilling to examine their prejudices, but who is also afraid to act on them most of the time due to social pressures. I think of friends or family members who have a long history of using racial slurs and other discriminatory language, but who may try to self-censor when their bourgeois liberal friend or relative is around out of politeness. I think about why a person would hold onto prejudice when they live in a world that offers a lot of opportunities to question those prejudices. I don’t want you to censor yourself—I actually have a low opinion of censorship in general. I want you to question your prejudices and see why they are irrational and counterproductive, and to help me to do the same.

For the timid bigot, prejudice and expressing it has limited (if any) social value and is counterproductive if acted on. So, they must have some psychological reward for maintaining it—a defense mechanism, shoring up feelings of inadequacy, or maybe a justification for an innate feeling of superiority? Both suggest a person with a large but fragile ego. The trouble of course is the belief that others are inferior, that others are less than, can be easily manipulated, as I talked about in the past. The timid bigot is easy prey for the demagogue or the propagandist or the cult leader or the con man, who convinces them that your prejudices are justified and valid; and uses these feelings of insecurity to make you think everyone else is lying to you, and only they can be trusted.

This of course suggests that the timid bigot is always potentially an active bigot, someone who could be emboldened by a social environment that lets their prejudices shine forth and who would be willing to act on them if the costs to them were lowered. If you can’t end prejudice, but can only choose to reflect on it, or not, this should give another good reason why such reflection should be done; a society with enough people unwilling to do the reflecting will be a society perpetually on the verge of eating itself. Maintaining a free society means taking a high level of responsibility for yourself; and a part of that is questioning why you believe what you do, not hiding behind the shield of opinion when your prejudices are challenged.

Maybe the most dangerous group of all are the “fair-weather liberals,” people who are not prejudiced but discriminate. Again, I don’t think “people who are not prejudiced” actually exist, and it follows that I also don’t think liberals are unprejudiced; but there are plenty of people on earth who are willing to question their own prejudices, but are either unwilling to challenge discrimination, or who are complicit in it because of the benefits they think they may gain. Politicians who make statements and vote for bills that they know are discriminatory, but fear for their jobs or their standing within their party are an example. Citizens who vote for said politicians or quietly support institutions that are discriminatory are part of this group too. They are the vast and silent masses when an authoritarian takeover happens; they go along to get along, hoping the crosshairs of repression will not be painted on them next, perhaps willing to sell out their friends, neighbors, and family because of social pressure or because their own anxiety keeps them from standing up to a society that practices discrimination.

1930s Germany was full of “Good Germans,” people who thought that by supporting “the party” they were being patriotic; and would benefit economically or in terms of status from it, and who later didn’t like what their government was doing but who were too busy or afraid or distracted to speak out or take action. History tells us that democracy and rule of law do not end overnight, but slide slowly into darkness as fair-weather liberals stand back and allow what is often a small but organized and highly vocal minority to set the agenda for everyone else. Fair-weather liberals watch as what was once unthinkable becomes normalized, and in the end play their role when social pressures come to call.

Martin Luther King himself often reserved his harshest words for the people who sat on the bench in silence while the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, including the “white moderates” who thought it was their responsibility to decide when Black Americans could be free, the sympathetic bystanders who were unwilling to take action even as they saw dogs and firehoses turned on peaceful protesters in the Jim Crow South, the fair-weather liberals who saw the system was unjust but were unwilling to say or do anything to challenge it out of fear of social consequences; or because of what they gained from the status quo. King himself was in his own time seen as a dangerous troublemaker, the most hated man in America for some, and in the end lost his life for his work. But he did not quail in the face of social pressure. Certainly, a man with lessons to carry forward from this day on.

For references and further reading, pick up Merton’s work or read the speeches and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. I would also recommend Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil as historical reference.