The Nature of Prejudice
Featuring Material from:
Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979

Framework
Man is not born prejudiced; rather, prejudice is learned. By its very nature, prejudice denies individual human dignity and breaks the fundamental unity among people. Gordon W. Allport defines prejudice as a hostile attitude or feeling toward a person solely because he or she belongs to a group to which one has assigned objectionable qualities. Allport stresses that this hostile attitude is not merely a hasty prejudgment before one knows the facts. It is a judgment that resists facts and ignores truth and honesty. Thus, prejudice blinds one to the facts and creates a kind of poison in a relationship. Although prejudice in daily life is ordinarily a matter of dealing with individual people, it also entails unwarranted ideas concern
ing a group as a whole. Negative religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice (based on grouping by religion, nationality, or race) is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization or stereotyping. According to Allport, it may be felt or expressed, and it is directed toward a group as a whole or toward an individual because he or she is a member of that group. Religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice persists for several reasons. Prejudice gives an individual a false sense of identity and self-worth; that is, a person may discriminate against others to make himself feel more powerful and to elevate his own self-esteem. Also, categorization and stereotyping often offer a convenient scapegoat for individual or group problems.
Prejudice, then, is generally the way one thinks or feels about a particular person or group. Discrimination is acting on that negative prejudice. Allport further explains that negative prejudice and discrimination are expressed in escalating levels of violence. These escalating levels of discrimination move from spoken abuse to genocide in the following order:
1. Spoken Abuse (which he calls Antilocution)
2. Avoidance
3. Discrimination or Legalized (Institutionalized) Racism
4. Violence Against People and Property
5. Extermination or Genocide (the systematic attempt to destroy an entire people)
 Allport contends that minor forms of prejudice such as spoken abuse have a way of growing into more virulent and destructive forms of discrimination and violence. In the following excerpts from The Nature of Prejudice, author Gordon Allport identifies the problem of prejudice, describes the escalating levels of violence associated with prejudice, and defines the meaning of scapegoat in ancient and modern society.

The following excerpts have been taken from:
THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE
By Gordon W. Allport
Copyright (c) 1979, 1958, 1954.  Reprinted by permission of sort out the factsPerseus Books Publishers,
a member of Perseus Books. L.L.C.
From: "What is the Problem?"
For myself, earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national and individual . . . I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices—made up of likings and dislikings—the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, and antipathies.
Charles Lamb
In Rhodesia a white truck driver passed a group of idle natives and muttered, "They’re lazy brutes." A few hours later he saw natives heaving two-hundred pound sacks of grain onto a truck, singing in rhythm to their work. "Savages," he grumbled. "What do you expect?"
In one of the West Indies it was customary at one time for natives to hold their noses conspicuously whenever they passed an American on the street. And in England, during th
e war, it was said, "The only trouble with the Yanks is that they are over-paid, over-sexed, and over here."
Polish people often called the Ukrainians "reptiles" to express their contempt for a group they regarded as ungrateful, revengeful, wily, and treacherous. At the same time Germans called their neighbors to the east "Polish cattle." The Poles retaliated with "Prussian swine"—a jibe at the presumed uncouthness and lack of honor of the Germans.
In South Africa, the English, it is said, are against the Afrikaner; both are against the Jews; all three are opposed to the Indians; while all four conspire against the native black.
In Boston, a dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church was driving along a lonesome road on the outskirts of the city. Seeing a small Negro boy trudging along, the dignitary told his chauffeur to stop and give the boy a lift. Seated together in the back of the limousine, the cleric, to make conversation, asked, "Little Boy, are you a Catholic?" Wide-eyed with alarm, the boy replied, "No sir, it’s bad enough being colored without being one of those things."
Pressed to tell what Chinese people really think of Americans, a Chinese student reluctantly replied, "Well, we think they are the best of the foreign devils." This incident occurred before the Communist revolution in China. Today’s youth in China are trained to think of Americans as the worst of the foreign devils.
In Hungary, the saying is, "An anti-Semite is a person who hates the Jews more than is absolutely necessary."

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