Cultural Prejudice
Created | Updated Sep 13, 2012
Are You A Victim of Prejudice?
Prejudice is any preconceived opinion or feeling, either favorable or unfavorable. In popular usage, it is generally understood to have a negative connotation. Often misdefined as without basis, a more correct understanding of prejudice is the application of general experience to some specific circumstance.
Do you sometimes get that awful feeling that you are about to endure the social awkwardness of a person who does not seem to understand that they are being obnoxious? Do you have ways of protecting yourself from being the victim?
A theory on prejudice I suggest considering is that it is a manifestation of our innate ability to generalize. Ah, you think, the use of generalizations is also viewed as being inappropriate. Still, the use of generalizations, or for that matter he use of prejudice, is not always improper. If you think about it, you could be surprised at how pervasive the use of ether mental trait really is in everyone’s life.
The power to generalize is one of the fundamental traits of the brain. Computers have a hard time doing what we can do easily. One profound reason for the disparity between computers and brains is that ability to generalize. This trait is closely aligned to a second fundamental ability of the brain, the ability to recognize patterns.
Bringing this back to the subject of prejudice, I submit that we all recognize patterns and generalize in most all of our mental activity. Prejudice is fundamental to human behavior. I must be quick to add that false prejudices are problematic and most people work hard to overcome them when recognized. Great harm has been done with the misuse of prejudice.
Essentially, any of our preferences are just prejudices by a different name. When we do find that a generalization has misled us, we should take care to adjust our thinking. As a practical matter, it is not possible to gather the facts for each unique situation we confront. An adult has learned some very elaborate rules to apply prejudice and more importantly when not to apply an overly generalized prejudice.
When there is a stranger in town, how do we react? Nice people often try to “keep an open mind.” After a few interactions, a new generalization can be made; she is “nice,” or she is “trouble.” So what is the difference between nice and trouble? Generally it is whether our own experience seems to be able to understand the stranger.
Sometimes we may decide she is odd. This means we cannot “relate” to her, but she seems to be reasonably harmless. Our experience does not allow us to understand [or predict] her behavior, but we can generalize that she is not here to upset the scheme of things. Perhaps she is not assimilating our culture, but she is being “polite.”
I was born into a conservative culture, but raised in a suburban neighborhood of a major city. I just could not understand the kind of prejudice I read about in the papers and in the History books. My propensity for understanding human nature drove me to want to comprehend this better.
Then it happened that I was sent to Biloxi Mississippi. While there I wanted to study prejudice. What I found was that as a stranger, I received more negative prejudicial treatment than I saw whites or colored people receive.
As a person, I was able to make friends and avoid that prejudice, but if I just walked down the street, I could feel the tension in the air from people who knew nothing of me. I began to hear the stories. It seemed that local people recognized that I did not fit the pattern of a “local.” The reaction was drastic because too many strangers had come to this town. Too many strangers had caused too many problems. Stories of fights were numerous. Other incidents were also mentioned. “How could this be happening in this day and age of reason?” I would ask myself.
Strangers were hated as such and in some ways the community was reinforcing the behaviors. The community did not have some town meeting to discus the subject. No, it was just one friend talking to another friend. After enough friends talk about a subject, most local people realized this was a real problem. It was because of too many bad experiences. I came away knowing the people of Biloxi to be good people, but I did not walk alone down some streets.
To some extent, the people of Biloxi had the right to their culture. And to some extent, strangers had actually caused problems for the people of Biloxi. From that point of view, I respect the prejudice I found in Biloxi. The point here is that that kind of prejudice is EVERYWHERE.
Prejudice is pervasive in the World today. If you are a victim of prejudice, consider how likely it is that you practiced it erroneously more often than you were denied some benefit.
The solution is not denial; rather it is a more conscious awareness of everyone’s need to properly use the mental trait of generalization. Not one of your neighbors is perfect, nor is that stranger. Perhaps we should consider more people to be “perfectly imperfect.”
