the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. She is also a recipient of the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. strmic-pawl is the founder and director of the campaign Support Ella Baker Day, which aims to create a holiday in honor of the civil rights movement activist Ella Baker. See www.hephzibahvsp.com for more on her work.
Chapter 1 Prejudice and Discrimination
Gordon W. Allport | Robert Merton
Prejudice is one of the early foundational concepts examined in relation to racism. Prejudice is most often studied as the irrational negative beliefs that individuals hold against groups and is usually observed as the precursor to discrimination, which is prejudice put into action. This chapter is based on The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon W. Allport, who was known for his work on personality psychology. Although this work was published in the 1950s, it continues to influence contemporary conversation. This chapter also includes a brief description of the often-referenced prejudice-discrimination typology written by the notable sociologist Robert Merton.*
Why This Theory
In the 1950s, when the book The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon W. Allport was published, the United States had recently confronted the atrocities of World War II and was facing difficult racial, ethnic, and religious tensions at home. The United States, like many other postindustrial nations, was experiencing success in advancing technology and growing national wealth but was not achieving similar successes in combating prejudice. Moreover, the increasingly global nature of capitalism was bringing disparate groups closer together, and as Allport states, “nations once safely separated by barricades of water or mountains are exposed to each other by air … products of the modern age have thrown human groups into each others’ [sic] laps. We have not yet learned how to adjust to our new mental and moral proximity.”1 Given these intersecting social landscapes and the prevalence of group animosities, an explanation was needed for the persistence of prejudice.
Allport culled together wide-ranging scholarship on prejudice and discrimination to propose a framework for understanding prejudice and to set a foundation for future work. While in his book, Allport states that bias can have a positive or negative connotation, his focus is on negative bias, with particular attention paid to religious and ethnic prejudice. He then explores discrimination, which is prejudice manifested in action.
Description of the Theory
Allport notes the difficulty of examining prejudice, particularly with a scientific analysis. First, prejudice is difficult to address because of the belief that prejudice is in the “eye of the beholder”; a cultural pluralistic approach often suggests that bias is based on one’s cultural viewpoint, so that what is considered bias to one is not to another. A second difficulty in studying prejudice is that it can be seen as burdened by emotional bias and as a creation of “angry liberals,” who believe they see bias everywhere, even where it does not exist. However, Allport unequivocally states that prejudice “is not ‘the invention of liberal intellectuals.’ It is simply an aspect of mental life that can be studied as objectively as any other.”2 Allport thus takes a highly systematic and scientific approach to his exploration and explanation of prejudice. The Nature of Prejudice is more than 500 pages, with eight main sections. This chapter does not follow the same outline of Allport’s book but instead synthesizes the information into five areas: (1) the definition of prejudice, (2) the nature of categorization, (3) in-groups and out-groups, (4) why prejudice exists and persists, and (5) prejudice in action.
The Definition of Prejudice
The definition of prejudice is not as straightforward as one might think. There are several components or facets of prejudice. Allport begins his definition by noting that “hate prejudice” comes out of “love prejudice.” Love prejudice is the bias toward and favoritism for one’s own primary group, and hate prejudice is the secondary prejudice that develops from defending one’s primary group.3 This conceptualization helps clarify that perceptions of in-groups and out-groups are at the center of the problem of prejudice. Next is the tendency for people to form concepts, categories, and generalizations, all of which lead to oversimplification and prejudgments. A prejudice can be based on a number of categories: race, sex, age, ethnicity, language, region, religion, nation, class, and more.4 People erroneously use these categories to classify people and then assume ideas about them that may or may not be correct. Another facet of prejudice is the distinction between attitude and belief. An attitude is expressed as a disfavor that is related to an overgeneralization of a group; an attitude can then lead to false beliefs about an individual or group.5 For example, the attitude of “I don’t like Latinxs” can then translate to a belief of “Latinxs are criminals.” A culminating and basic facet of prejudice is hostility and rejection, which results in condemnation of individuals based on their group membership.6 Thus, Allport comes to define ethnic prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group.”7
Yet it’s important to remember that not all prejudgments or generalizations are prejudice. If a person rejects a prejudgment after being presented with alternative information and evidence, there is rational thought involved. Prejudice, on the other hand, is emotional and rejects countering information:
Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. Emotion tends to elevate when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus, the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance.8
Central to this process of prejudgment is the nature of categorization.
The Nature of Categorization
Categorization is a human imperative because it makes daily activities more efficient and helpful for ordinary living. For example, categorizing types of cups can distinguish between a juice glass and a coffee mug, and such categorization can help one navigate a morning routine. A basic definition of a category is “an accessible cluster of associated ideas which as a whole has the property of guiding daily adjustments.”9 Thus, categorization is not necessarily negative or irrational, and there is valuable use in a “differentiated category,” which has allowance for variation and subdivision rather than an irrational overgeneralization.10
An important part of the categorization process, which is often then associated with prejudice, is how people come to see difference. “Difference” is often assigned by society rather than inherent, and there is a process of coming to see certain groups of people as distinguishable from one another. First, there needs to be some easily identifiable feature to which “difference” is attached. This marker of difference then becomes easily identifiable by prejudiced people. For example, in the case of race, skin color is marked as different. Yet skin color itself is not the reason for the prejudice but instead is the aid for determining the target of the prejudice.11 Difference serves as a “condensing rod” for grouping people together and perpetually seeing them unfavorably.12
The use of particular terms and labels is also significant in the categorization process. Prejudiced labels are embedded with negative emotion, such as the difference between calling a teacher a “schoolteacher” versus the prejudiced label of “school marm,” which imagines teachers as single women who are too strict and proper.13 Labels also serve to create cohesion between a category and a symbol. This cohesion is clearly seen with the range of labels used to symbolize racial groups, particularly those often assigned to Black communities, such as “thugs” or “ghetto.” The cohesion between a category and