What is Prejudice?
This vignette illustrates some of the many complicated dimensions associated with critical social justice. While most people want to be fair, we can’t help but have preconceived notions—prejudices—about other people based on their social groups (in this case, the candidate’s gender). At the same time, we often feel deeply hurt and insulted when someone suggests that we have prejudices at all, let alone that they are showing. To gain a more complex understanding of the dynamics in the above vignette, we must first examine the relationship between two interrelated concepts: prejudice and discrimination.
Prejudice: Learned prejudgment about members of social groups to which we don’t belong. Prejudice is based on limited knowledge or experience with the group. Simplistic judgments and assumptions are made and projected onto everyone from that group.
Prejudice is learned prejudgment toward social others and refers to internal thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and assumptions based on the groups to which they belong. While everyone has prejudices based on distinctive experiences that are unique to them—for example, someone got into a legal dispute with a cashier and now doesn’t trust cashiers—here we are concerned with the collective prejudices we learn from the culture at large about our own and other social groups.
These prejudices can be either positive or negative. However, they are always unfair, because they are not earned by the individual but granted or imposed based on ideas about the group that the individual belongs to. For example, I prefer to teach math to Chinese heritage students because I assume they will do well on the math test, and I don’t like to teach math to White female students because I assume they will do poorly. While the prejudice I have toward the Chinese heritage students appears to be positive, it is still unfair in that it isn’t earned, will interfere with my ability to make valid assessments, and sets one racial group up against others.
Prejudice manifests in attitudes about an individual, but it is based on our ideas about the group to which that individual belongs. Prejudice is part of how we learn to sort people into categories that make sense to us
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(boy/girl, old/young, rich/poor). Although this is a process necessary for learning, our categorizations are not neutral. We are socialized to perceive and value these categories differently.
For example, take the categories of “attractive” and “unattractive.” While there is some variation in opinion between people, on the level of collective socialization, there are sanctioned norms of beauty constantly communicated to us through major institutions such as the entertainment industry. Media-based representations present a consistent image of who the attractive people are, what they look like, and what we can do to look more like them (if you doubt this, just scan the magazine rack at your local grocery store).
Most of us are acutely aware that there are social benefits that go with being in the “attractive” group and social penalties for being in the “unattractive” group. These benefits and penalties are communicated to us explicitly—effusive praise for a celebrity’s beauty, magazine covers featuring the “100 Most Beautiful People,” the “20 Hottest Bodies,” the open ridicule of unattractive people, more praise for us when we “dress up”—and implicitly through larger salaries, career advancement, better evaluations, and other research-documented benefits that accrue to those considered attractive (Hamermesh & Parker, 2005; Rhode, 2010).
These definitions are not natural but are specific to a given cultural context. They change over time and our perceptions change with them, indicating the learned nature of our prejudices. For example, in the United States Marilyn Monroe was once considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. However, while she might still epitomize the White, blonde ideal of feminine beauty, she would be considered overweight today and therefore would not have the beauty status that she held over 50 years ago.
Prejudices begin as stereotypes. While many use these terms interchangeably, there are important nuances. Stereotypes refer to reduced or simplified characteristics attributed to a group. For example, if we ask someone to describe Americans and Canadians, they may answer that Americans are industrious, independent, and like fast food, while Canadians are polite, love hockey, and end their sentences with “eh.” When we ask what elementary school teachers are like, we may have ideas that they are nurturing and loving. These kinds of simplifications are either a set of characteristics attributed to a group (elementary school teachers are nurturing), or a feature of some members of a group that stands out (Canadian speech, American eating habits).
People often say that there is always a kernel of truth to stereotypes, but this belief has more to do with the ways in which stereotypes work and
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less to do with their validity. For example, although some Canadians end some of their sentences with “eh,” most Canadians do not. Yet this distinction is what helps us make sense of the category “Canadian” as distinct from the category “American.” This is especially easy to see in the realm of media where having, for example, a character say “eh” establishes that character as Canadian. For an American watching these movies, this stereotype is reinforced again and again. Because many Americans may not know many Canadians, we don’t have much else to draw on and over time come to believe this is how Canadians talk. The stereotype is now formed in our minds and will appear to be true because we are drawing on the fixed representation we have seen so regularly. When we encounter people who don’t fit the stereotype, we either don’t notice or we view these people as exceptions. On the other hand, when we encounter people who do fit the stereotype, even if we encounter them very rarely, they stand out to us and reinforce the stereotype as true. Therefore, if we hold this stereotype and visit Canada, we will notice any Canadian we hear say “eh” and disregard the countless Canadians we meet who don’t, thus reinforcing our belief in this particular stereotype.
Prejudice comes into play when we add values to our stereotypes. Let’s put stereotypes together with values, using the example of “elementary school teacher.” If I am a parent going to meet my son’s 2nd-grade teacher for the first time, I would expect to meet a female (as the vast majority of elementary teachers are female). If instead I meet a male, I may wonder if he is gay (a common stereotype about male elementary school teachers) and worry that if he is, he will be an inappropriate role model for my son (a common prejudice about gay men). This worry develops from the interaction between stereotypes about male elementary school teachers and the values associated with those stereotypes in our culture, leading to a prejudicial attitude that my son’s gay teacher will be an unsuitable role model.
PERSPECTIVE CHECK: If I am a gay parent, or have close relationships with many gay people whom I advocate for, I am more likely to be informed and educated on the issues and thus not have the same worry.
Notice how conceptions about the teacher are interwoven in important ways with conceptions about gender roles. These conceptions are important because they are the basis of our evaluations for what is “normal”; every teacher we encounter who does not match our internal definition of “teacher” will be evaluated differently than the “normal”
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teachers who do match them. These evaluations don’t just distinguish between who is deemed normal and who isn’t, but also influence our assessments of other important social values such as character. When we assign character values, our stereotypes have moved into prejudice.
Many of us think that we don’t hold prejudicial thoughts against people. Because we think this, we see ourselves as free of prejudice. But the process is much more complicated. The reality is that no one can avoid prejudice because it is built into our socialization. All humans have prejudices, but they are so normalized and taken for granted that they are often very difficult to identify. This is one of the challenges of critical social justice literacy: developing the critical thinking that would enable us to bring our prejudices to the surface and reflect upon and challenge them. Yet society tells us that it is bad to have prejudices, and thus we feel pressure to deny them.
However, because social acceptance of prejudices varies over time, we don’t feel compelled to deny all of our prejudices. In fact, when we hold prejudices against certain groups—groups that it is socially acceptable to hold prejudices against—we often don’t see them as prejudices at all, but as facts. For example, not too long ago it was socially acceptable for White people to openly admit holding prejudicial beliefs about Black people, which they saw as justified because most White people believed that Black racial inferiority was simply true. Today this belief is understood to be untrue, and to admit to holding such a belief is no longer considered acceptable in most circles. However, admitting to prejudices against people considered overweight (especially women) is currently acceptable. And in fact, not only are these prejudices acceptable, but many magazines, for example, openly ridicule women perceived as overweight.
While there are health risks to obesity, the beauty and entertainment industries are invested in selling us the idea of fat as ugly, as undisciplined, and as worthy of contempt. These ideas allow us to rationalize our prejudice. The economic interest in maintaining these prejudices is so deep that they are marketed to all people. Consequently, girls who have not even reached puberty are socialized into a culture of dieting, and very few people feel satisfied with their bodies regardless of their size or health (Grogan, 2016; Levin & Kilbourne, 2008). These industries relentlessly present the image of the ideal body, and this ideal has become increasingly unattainable and in some contexts (such as the modeling industry) unhealthy. In fact, the image is so unrealistic that the magazine cover models themselves don’t actually look like the images presented; images are routinely digitally modified to reshape their bodies, decrease their weight, enhance their breasts, remove their pores, and more.
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This leads to deep body dissatisfaction, which in turn translates into billions of dollars for the beauty and diet industries.