also have a significant group of friends who keep me propped up in so many ways; I send a special thanks to Psusennes Nurisha Bey, Ben Carrington, Garfield Charles, Clay Clark, Ali Cohen, Laura Coleman, Danielle Dirks, Alicia Escott, Jessi Frazier, Anthony Freeman, James Gantt, Drea Jacobs, Meghan Johnston, Mary Beth Lineberry, Manouchehr Mohajeri, Anthony Peguero, Debbie Perkins, Louise Rasmussen, and Damien Tillman. To Teddy Adolphe, whose friendship brought me so much and whom I miss greatly, I keep close these words you gave me: “When it comes to living life, live each new day doing something worth living more.”
I am grateful to my family for keeping me grounded while also believing in my goals. I particularly appreciate the persistent question that now has become a joke: Are you finished writing that book yet? I’m so very thankful for my siblings, who are always there for me; thank you Matthew, Mark, Gabriel, and Gudrun. A special recognition to my nieces and nephews, who bring me silliness and smiles, because that’s important: thank you Annabelle, Cypri, Essie, Hailey, Mila, Parker, Peyton, River, Sam, and Vera. And I especially thank my parents, Mildred Strmic and Charles Pawl, who are unwavering in their encouragement and support, which are reflected in so many ways. A particularly massive thank-you has to go to my mother, who read and edited every page of this book. She is a serious critic and grammarian, and I don’t know how I could write anything without her. My mom’s ability to be simultaneously a critical editor and a supportive mother reflects her infinite patience, incredible dedication, and immeasurable love.
And finally, this book would not have come to fruition without the encouragement of acquisitions editor, Jeff Lasser, and the team at SAGE. Since the initial conversation about this project, Jeff has been supportive, and I sincerely thank him for believing in me and in this book.
About the Author
hephzibah v. strmic-pawlis Associate Professor of Sociology at Manhattanville College in New York, where she researches and teaches in the areas of race, racism, multiracialism, and history of activism. She is the author of Multiracialism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Analysis of Asian-White and Black-White Multiracials (Lexington Books) and coeditor with Milton Vickerman of Race and Ethnicity: Constancy in Change (Cognella). She is the founding pedagogy editor of 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:
