CHAPTER 1
The Persistence of Prejudice
Prejudice is ubiquitous. Our lives are rife with it. Wherever we go, we are likely to encounter it in its manifold guises. Ever ready to hand, it feeds into our proclivity to explain away the complexities, subtleties, and specificities of personality, culture, and the world at large in the name of simplification, abstraction, and generalization. Prejudice knows no social or economic boundaries. It is equally prevalent among the poor and the rich, the educated and the uneducated, the rank-and-file and the elite. Immigrant and native, tourist and anthropologist are equally vulnerable to its insidious and pernicious charms. It has no redeeming features, causing harm wherever it treads: to its object, by reducing it to a handful of — typically, undesirable — traits, thereby setting it up for contempt, ridicule, hatred, and violence; to the one who holds it, by imprisoning him within the walls of its own making, by shutting him off from reality, by filling him with ill will and, all too often, hostility toward others, thereby impoverishing and poisoning his existence and, in the worst case, turning him into a criminal.
Why does prejudice have such a strong hold on us? Why is it so persistent, so difficult — if not to say, virtually impossible — to eradicate?
Many an attempt has been made at explaining the persistence of prejudice in etiological, psychological, behavioral, and socio-historical terms. An extensive body of knowledge on prejudice in its many forms has been amassed predicated on such questions as: How does prejudice come into being and under what conditions? Which individuals or groups hold what kinds of prejudice, and to what extent can the incidence of prejudice be said to be a function of education, economic status, socialization, acculturation, as well as historical and political pressures and constraints? What are the emotional and psychological springs of prejudice, and what needs does it fulfill for the individual or the group?
One would think that with this body of knowledge concerning the conditions and manifestations of prejudice in hand we would be further along on the arduous road to its demise. Yet if we look around us, we cannot fail to observe that prejudice is rampant. Thus, it would seem that, at best, a tenuous — if not wholly fortuitous — connection can plausibly be established between understanding, or presuming to understand, the individual and collective origins as well as the psychological and socio-historical conditions of prejudice and the rate of its de facto decline. Often, the same people who presume to understand so well the underlying conditions of others' prejudice (and ought thus a fortiori to be able to apply this knowledge to themselves) tend to be blind to their own bigotry. Often, the ostensible overcoming of prejudice on the part of members of one group against members of another group will be accompanied by the rise among members of the same group of similar prejudice directed elsewhere. Often, the same people who oppose prejudice in one context will themselves act prejudicially in another. In other words, prejudice tends to get displaced rather than disappear. Concomitantly, the possession of pertinent facts or data doesn't entail the demise of prejudice either. For instance, knowing that the majority of contemporary Germans do not subscribe to National Socialist ideology has not made the prejudice go away among some that 'deep down' Germans 'somehow' continue to be Nazis.
Why is this? Could it be that something about prejudice has escaped traditional approaches to it? Something that needs to be accounted for first if we want more fully to grasp the staying power of prejudice, which, in turn, is a precondition for reining it in and, ideally, overcoming it? My answer is yes. And this 'something' is, I believe, nothing less than the very meaning of 'prejudice' at its most basic level — at the level of its 'molecular' structure, its 'DNA', as it were — which, as I shall demonstrate, turns out to be much more complex and intricate than both dictionary and common knowledge would allow for, and which holds the key to understanding what makes prejudice so persistent and tenacious in its very essence, and where and how best to begin tackling it with a view to rendering it powerless.
CHAPTER 2
The 'Pickler Incident'
Last year, I traveled to Germany under the auspices of the US Consulate General in connection with a short book I had published entitled 17 Prejudices That We Germans Hold Against America and Americans and That Can't Quite Be True. I had been invited to deliver several public lectures on the subject of my book at various local academic institutions and give a workshop at the US Consulate General in Düsseldorf, Germany, geared specifically toward US and German consular officials, politicians, and cultural representatives at large on how productively to deal with and avoid the pitfalls of cultural and ethnic prejudice.
I began the workshop by playing a YouTube clip of an episode of the FOX network game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, in which twenty-two-year-old country-pop singer-songwriter Kelly Pickler is asked to tackle the third-grade world geography question: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?" As Pickler throws her hands up in the air in dismay and disbelief and Nathan, her fifth-grade fellow player, locks in with what will turn out to be the correct answer to the question, a jovial murmur ripples through the group of about fifteen workshop participants gathered around the long conference table. The murmur builds into a forceful chuckle as Pickler turns to Jeff Foxworthy, the show host, and announces with a languid Southern drawl, "This might be a stupid question ...," swells into hearty laughter at Foxworthy's retort, "I'm guessing it's probably gonna be," and bursts into full-blown guffawing at Pickler's actual question-cum-confession: "But, like, I thought Europe was a country!?" From here on to the end of the four-minute clip, the room is swept away on a rollercoaster ride of comic relief through the peaks and troughs of Pickler's display of blissful ignorance: "Budas ... Budapest ... I've never even heard of that! I know that they speak French there, don't they? Like, I wanna say, is France a country? I don't know what I'm doing!" And when, toward the end of the clip, upon being told by the show host that "the right answer is Hungary," Pickler blurts out, "Hungry? That's a country? Now, I've heard of Turkey!," the workshop participants are in stitches.
As I log off and close my laptop, the laughter subsides, giving way to what appears to be an awkward, tense silence — as if there were something shameful about giving free rein to one's limbic self at the expense of a blond twenty-two-year-old American pop star in this particular, culturally diverse setting.
In order to initiate a dialogue on what just happened, I ask the workshop participants what they think was so funny about the clip, and why they think they all laughed so hard. In the course of the group discussion that follows, three reasons are adduced by various workshop participants by way of explanation for their strong, visceral reactions to the clip.
The first reason, shared by German and US participants alike, is the sheer fact that an adult person can be so ignorant and uneducated. So unbelievable does Pickler's ignorance appear to be, in fact, that some of the workshop participants ask whether this is for real, or whether she is just acting dumb.
The second reason (also shared, as far as I can tell, by US and German participants of both sexes alike, even by the only two blond female participants) feeds directly into the first by bestowing a certain plausibility on what seemed incomprehensible from a squarely developmental viewpoint: Pickler embodies and, thus, confirms the stereotype of the dumb blonde (the Southern drawl doesn't help either, nor does her profession). In other words, because she happens to be a young, good-looking, blond woman, and a country-pop singer to boot (neither of which enjoys a high intellectual reputation), her ignorance — at first, a liability precisely because it did not meet certain, tacitly agreed-upon expectations regarding an average adult's horizon of knowledge — reveals itself as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: Being ignorant and dumb turns out to be precisely what one would expect of someone like Pickler.
The third reason, floated by a German participant, who is immediately seconded by several others, appears to create a palpable sense of discomfort and uneasiness around the table: Pickler is living proof that Americans are dumb. Again, an awkward, tense silence sets in, this time punctured by throat-clearing, body-posture-readjusting, and nervous leafing through my book (copies of which had been supplied to the attendees in advance of the workshop), which happens to begin with a set of critical reflections on the validity of two of the most prevalent prejudices among Germans against America and Americans, namely, that the latter are presumably dumb and uneducated.
As a group, the workshop participants have now reached a critical point in their conversation. All of a sudden, a sharp division into 'us' (Germans) and 'them' (Americans) has been introduced into what up to now seemed like a more or less cohesive, if by no means homogeneous, team of professionals gathered together for a specific, communally beneficial purpose. And not only that — clearly, 'they' have been assigned a lower rank in what appears to be (judging by the participants' shared approval of the first two reasons) the tacitly agreed-upon hierarchy of values among all ?participants, in which knowledge and intelligence would seem to occupy sufficiently elevated positions.
I cannot tell who among the workshop participants is more uncomfortable — the Americans or the Germans who presumably think that Americans are 'dumb'. But, clearly, for both sides this must be a decisive moment, and a lot depends on how it will be resolved. The ones have divulged what they presumably really think about the others, while the latter now know what some of their fellow participants and co-workers really think about them. How to continue the conversation under these circumstances? How to move beyond this stalemate?
Suddenly, one of the German participants breaks the silence: "Of course, not all Americans are dumb!" Another immediately follows suit: "Yes, yes, one has to be careful ..." But, apparently, what's done is done, and these interventions don't seem to carry enough weight to undo the preceding gesture of blanket cultural denigration bespeaking deep-seated cultural resentment. Silence again takes over the conference room.
At this point, I suggest revisiting the clip and our reactions to it by way of defusing this somewhat volatile situation. One of the things that strikes me in particular, I point out to the workshop participants, is that, so far, nobody seems to have taken into account the fact that in the clip Pickler is in the minority. After all, the show host, fifth-grader Nathan, and — judging by their hearty laughter throughout Pickler's 'performance'— a sizable number of the members of the fairly large audience on the show as well, all seem to know the answer to the question that so flusters the blond singer. If anything, then, I suggest to my audience, the 'Pickler incident' would appear to be living proof that its protagonist is certainly not representative of Americans (or, for that matter, blond women) in general. "Yes, yes," one of the workshop participants impatiently cuts in, "why don't we ask who among those present knows the capital of Kyrgyzstan, or what country Bishkek is the capital of?"
This seems to be just the kind of punch line needed to pop the balloon of unease that has been hovering about the room for quite some time now and get the group out of the socio-cultural pickle it has gotten itself into.
"But, seriously," one of the German participants remarks after the laughter triggered by the Kyrgyzstan-Bishkek intervention has died down, "don't we need prejudice in order to make sense of the world around us, in order to orient ourselves? I mean, so often we cannot but rely on opinion, custom, stereotype, and prejudice if we want to find our bearings at all, can we?" "Well," I suggest, looking at the blond German woman who posed the question, "why don't we take one particular prejudice and see whether this is really the case? For instance, everybody knows that blondes are dumb, or that Germans are Nazis, right?"
* * *
Let me stop my account here and sum up what happened at the US Consulate that day: A bicultural group of highly educated and successful male and female professionals, gathered for the purpose of enhancing their understanding of the workings of prejudice with a view to applying the insights generated at the workshop productively in their respective professional and personal lives, succumbed to the seduction of prejudice in spite of ?being in the position to know first-hand that the prejudices activated by the 'Pickler incident' were not only unsustainable from a logical and broadly empirical standpoint (being 'dumb' is neither a function of hair color nor of nationality), but that they were also blatantly and palpably contradicted by the specific conditions of the workshop itself. For clearly, the Americans seated at the conference table as well as the two blond female participants ought to have been sufficient living proof for the implausibility of maintaining that Americans in general and blondes in general are 'dumb'.
At least one of the participants, moreover, appeared explicitly to subscribe to the popular theory according to which we need prejudice in order to be able to structure, make sense of, and navigate the world we live in — a theory that, as my somewhat provocative question suggested, would seem to cave in as soon as it is tested against reality.
What happened at the workshop is significant in three respects: (1) It throws into sharp relief that the common dissociation of prejudice and knowledge — the common view, that is, that prejudice is presumably predicated on lack of knowledge or information — is highly problematic and in need of rethinking. (2) It enjoins us to take a closer critical look at the popular view that we need prejudice in order to function. (3) It testifies to a sloppiness in conceptual thinking that contributes to the lumping together under the general head of 'prejudice' of all kinds of terms and senses that do not actually mean the phenomenon 'prejudice'— such as 'opinion', 'bias', 'custom', and 'stereotype'— and do, consequently, not have the same pragmatic impact as 'prejudice'.
This essay, as I suggested earlier, begins from the premise that prejudice is a purely nefarious phenomenon devoid of any positive value, an ideological toxin that eats away at the social fabric that sustains us. It thus goes against a long intellectual and cultural tradition extending all the way into the present that emphasizes the evolutionary, cognitive, and ethical value of prejudice, without which, as William Hazlitt famously observed, "I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life."
The exact opposite is maintained in these pages. Far from being a necessary aid for finding our bearings in this life and this world, prejudice is precisely what prevents us from seeing both for what they are and as they are. To the extent that, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has argued, "the world is all that is the case," viewing the world through prejudice-colored glasses will necessarily distort "what is the case," whatever the case may be. This is not to suggest that a strictly objective apprehension of the world is even possible, but it is to remind ourselves that depending on how we look at the world, depending on the frameworks we use to interpret it, what we see will correspond more or less to "what is the case"; and in the case of prejudice, what we see will correspond rather less than more to "what is the case."
