One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Via Markus Spiske on Unsplash

March 12, 2020, at 8:30 PM

As I read pages 89-127 of Race recently, my mind kept coming back to a central question. Are humans naturally prejudiced, or is prejudice just convenient for most humans? Is there a difference?

To clarify, by “convenient” I mean, does prejudice help humans to advance their own causes? I think the answer to that question is undeniably yes, as evidenced by demagogues like Hitler (an extreme example) who gain a following by scapegoating a particular group. So, then I start to wonder: how often do people truly believe in their prejudices, and how often are they just trying to gain themselves something?

As it happens, we discussed the very question of Hitler in my AP World History class the other day. My teacher, acknowledging that it might be controversial, asked us whether Hitler truly hated Jews or was using Germany’s hatred of Jews to advance himself. Not being privy to Hitler’s inner thoughts, it’s impossible to know. But this conversation set the ball rolling in my head: are people naturally prejudiced? Or do they realize, at some point in their lives, that prejudice will help them get somewhere? If the latter is true, must some people be naturally prejudiced, for leaders to realize they can capitalize on it?

Where does prejudice come from?

Aronson pretty much explains his answer to this question at the beginning of the book, as I described in my last post. He thinks humans are basically prejudiced, and writes, “Each time we ease on prejudice, we rush to reinforce another. As I see it, the tribe thinks only it is human” (Aronson 30). He also acknowledges that many scholars disagree with him, believing that “human beings are basically good, and are taught to hate only by specific societies and for specific reasons” (Aronson 30).

This is the debate I hope to figure out my own position on, if not during this blog post then before I finish the book. I don’t disagree that it seems every prejudice eradicated is replaced by another. It sometimes seems that, when society collectively takes one step forward, it takes two steps back. What I contest is whether this phenomenon is a result of human nature, or whether it has another source. As I see it, there could be at least three possible explanations for why people are prejudiced, and I think they are all partially true.

1. It’s truly human nature
2. It’s convenient — people get something out of being prejudiced
3. It’s conditioned by society

Human Nature

As Aronson points out, prejudice has always existed. In this section, he describes how different types of prejudices developed after exploration of the New World, the Protestant Reformation, and the beginnings of “race” during the Enlightenment. He certainly makes a compelling case, by outlining all of these things, in favor of prejudice as a human characteristic, because this section is a continuation of the chronology of prejudice that the book essentially is. Since it builds on the prejudice Aronson discusses in the first 89 pages, this content certainly drives home the idea that prejudice is a constant throughout human history. If it exists in so many forms, couldn’t it just be a part of us?

I think I would sooner say that humans are naturally predisposed to be prejudiced than that they are naturally prejudiced. For example, I don’t think babies are born with prejudice. Prejudice has also existed in too many forms to say that all humans have a certain type — Aronson’s point in the book thus far has been that racism is only a slice of prejudice in history. Instead, I think it is more accurate to say that humans can easily become prejudiced as a part of our nature.

The other reason I am not inclined to think humans are precisely naturally prejudiced, based on the reading I did in this section, is that most examples of prejudice given resulted in the prejudiced person gaining something. Whether it was Europeans gaining free labor by declaring that Native Americans and Africans were racially inferior, or various groups (white people, Protestants) gaining the comfort of believing they were the superior group, prejudice usually leads to benefit for the prejudiced. This makes me think prejudice involves an element of choice, and leads me to my next idea about its origin: convenience.

Convenience

Aronson writes about the debate in the mid-1500s between two Spanish scholars, Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, over whether indigenous Americans were humans, with souls, or subhuman, veritable monsters. Las Casas believed that the natives were people, while Sepúlveda did not. Aronson explains:

“The Spaniards of the New World sided with Sepúlveda. Whether they truly believed the Indians were subhuman or simply found it convenient to make the argument is now impossible to say. Believing people are slavelike and treating them inhumanely fit together seamlessly. The overseer holding the whip sees the cringing slave and calls him cowardly; he doesn’t notice the weapon that is supplying his own courage is creating the slave’s fear” (Aronson 95-96).

This is the crucial point in my opinion: prejudice inherently reinforces power structures. And the reason power structures are in place, usually, is that they benefit the people in power. As Aronson alludes, white slave owners perpetuated cycles of power and violence to continue owning the slaves that made them money. When we view prejudice as a means to an end, a justification for a bigger goal, our understanding of it changes from human nature to a byproduct of human nature. One could argue that humans are naturally greedy, which often encourages them to develop prejudices that help them attain more goods.

The problem I see with this explanation is that it doesn’t perfectly account for a lot of modern-day prejudice, which often seems to consist of visceral hatred. Sure, people benefit by feeling superior to another group of people, and that should not be overlooked as an example of the convenience of prejudice. But I don’t think most people consciously realize that they benefit from feeling this superiority in the same way that they realize they don’t like other groups; I think they just hate blindly. This makes me think that there must be a third source of prejudice: social conditioning.

Social Conditioning

I don’t think it’s possible to ignore the role that social conditioning plays in the development of prejudice. Setting aside the question of how the people who make children prejudiced became prejudiced themselves (that’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario I really don’t want to explore), it is clear that adults are responsible for children becoming prejudiced, since we’ve already established that babies aren’t born that way.

Take, for example, something that Aronson explains in Chapter 7. “Just as Aristotle’s observations of ancient Athens were recycled to defend two thousand years of prejudice, a complete misreading of the Old Testament was reinforced as it was passed from one slave-trafficking group to another. The degraded condition of people assumed to be inferior and denied their rights proved that they were, in fact, inferior. The Bible supplied the unshakable explanation” (Aronson 103).

The misreading of the Old Testament he mentions is referred to as the “curse of Ham,” Ham being one of Moses’s sons whose son was cursed by Moses. (Yes, that was a confusing sentence. The story goes that Moses punished Ham for something by cursing Ham's son). Over time, people began to believe, baselessly, that Ham’s descendants all had dark skin, and that they had been cursed. In this way, Europeans used the Bible to explain why Africans were inferior.

The “curse of Ham” shows the way that social traditions can influence prejudice. The Bible is an example of a social tradition that is passed down from generation to generation, impacting everyone who believes its words. Without the structure of the Bible (or, more broadly, religion), people would have no “curse of Ham” to believe made Africans somehow inferior.

Prejudiced people in a person’s life serve the same function. Without, for example, racist parents, a person is a lot less likely to become racist themselves. But if you have racist parents, you can easily be conditioned to be racist yourself. This is the power of society in creating, or, more accurately, perpetuating, prejudice.

Conclusion — Sort Of

I think it’s clear that prejudice is the product of a lot of influences. In my view, predisposition, convenience, and conditioning from society all play a role. I don’t feel prepared to make a judgment on which is the biggest influence, or the most important. I do think, however, that it is important to understand all of the possible causes of prejudice if we ever want to prove Aronson wrong and eradicate it, whether as a society or as individuals. I welcome anyone’s views on where prejudice comes from — while Race is focused on its historical origins, I am captivated by the question of whether, at an individual level, prejudice comes from within, the outside, or both.

Works Cited

Aronson, Marc. Race: A History beyond Black and White. Atheneum Books for Young
     Readers, 2007.

Spiske, Markus. Segregated Game Pieces. Unsplash, 10 Nov. 2018, unsplash.com/
     photos/QozzJpFZ2lg. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.