Apartheid. USA 1988

May 12, 1987:

‘In seeking to understand the tenacity of prejudice,’ wrote Daniel Goleman in the Times, ‘researchers are turning away from an earlier focus on such extreme racism as that exhibited by members of the Ku Klux Klan to examine the pernicious stereotypes among people who do not consider themselves prejudiced.’

A troubling aspect of the problem, researchers find, is that many stereotypes seem to be helpful in organizing perceptions of the world. Recent studies on this cognitive aspect, amplifying on earlier work, are proving useful in explaining the tenacity of prejudice as a distortion of that process. One finding is that people tend to seek and remember situations that reinforce stereotypes, while avoiding those that do not. Another troubling conclusion of the research is that simply putting people of different races together, does not necessarily eliminate prejudice. For example, Walter Stephan, a psychologist at the University of Delaware, found in a review of 18 studies of the effects of school desegregation that interracial hostilities increased more often than they decreased at desegregated schools.

Psychologist Goleman continued, ‘Overt, admitted bigotry is on the decline, studies indicate. Yet they reveal that a more subtle form of prejudice, in which people disavow

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racist attitudes but nevertheless act with prejudice in some situations, is not declining.’ Such people justify prejudiced actions or attitudes with what they believe are rational, non-racist explanations. To those, who have felt the sting of racial discrimination, the phenomenon is well known. Part of the difficulty in eradicating prejudice, even in those who intellectually see it is wrong, stems from its deep emotional roots. ‘The emotions of prejudice are formed in early childhood, while the beliefs that are used to justify it came later,’ said Thomas Pettigrew, a psychologist at the University of Santa Cruz, California, a noted scholar in the field. ‘Later in life you may want to change your prejudice, but it is far easier to change your intellectual beliefs than your deep feelings.’ Dr Pettigrew continued, ‘Many Southerners have confessed to me, for instance, that even though in their minds they no longer feel prejudice against blacks, they still feel squeamish when they shake hands with a black. These feelings are left over from what they learned in their families as children.’

Psychoanalytic theories, too, point to the importance of childhood experience. ‘We distinguish between the familiar and the strange early in infancy,’ said Mortimer Ostow, a psychoanalyst and professor of pastoral psychiatry at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. ‘Then in childhood, when we join groups, we learn to draw boundaries between us and them. By adolescence the group identity becomes even more important, and outgroups become the place to deposit your own faults.’

The classic psychoanalytic literature on prejudice notes that a person's own sense of insecurity is often reflected in the need to find an outgroup to despise, with the person's most loathed personality characteristic pushed onto someone else - thus, the ‘filthy’ Jews or blacks, or Italians or whites.’ Dr Ostow and other psychoanalysts have studied people in treatment who explored their own anti-Semitic prejudices. ‘The inner dynamics are surprising,’ said Dr Ostow. ‘We find that there almost always was a time in the past when the prejudiced person was attracted to the other

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group. The prejudice is a later repudiation of that earlier attraction.’ Dr Ostow feels that the child becomes fascinated by strangers, particularly by people in a group other than that of his own family. The child then pulls back from the fascination, often after a rebuff or disappointment, or when he feels guilty at betraying his family. When the attraction happens later in life, the turning-point is often rejection by a lover. ‘The prejudice that forms symbolizes a loyalty to home and its values,’ Dr Ostow said, ‘but it is built on a deep ambivalence.’^97.

The mind looks for ways to simplify the chaos around it. Lumping people into categories is one way. ‘We all need to categorize in order to make our way through the world,’ said Myron Rothbart, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. ‘And that is where the problem begins: We see the category and not the person.’

The tenacity of people's stereotypes, both innocent and destructive, is a result of the pervasive role of categorization in mental life. And the stereotypes tend to be self-confirming. ‘It is hard to change people's preconceptions once they are established,’ said Dr Stephan, who is working on the new research. ‘Even if you present people with evidence that disconfirms their stereotypes - an emotionally open and warm Englishman, say, who breaks your image of the cold, reserved English - they will find ways to deny the evidence. They can say, “He's unusual,” or “It's just that he has been drinking.” ‘

In a study of recently desegrated schools, Janet Schofield, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, found that many black students thought the whites considered themselves superior. When white students offered help to black students, the blacks often spurned the offers, seeing them as a confirmation of the attitudes they attributed to the whites. And research by David Hamilton, a psychologist at

97. It is impossible and would be improper to duplicate the entire article by Dr Goleman

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the University of California at Santa Barbara, shows that people tend to seek and remember information that confirms their stereotypes. So, a black who sees whites as haughty and unfriendly may notice these whites more and remember them better than the whites who were warm and friendly. And if, for example, white people avoid black people, there is little opportunity for receiving information that might contradict their stereotypes. Even people who profess not to be prejudiced often exhibit subtle forms of bias, according to research by psychologist Samuel Gaertner of the University of Delaware and John Dovidio of Colgate University. Many national surveys have shown, for example, that the racial attitudes of whites have become markedly more tolerant over the last 40 years. But other research suggests that ‘although the old-fashioned “redneck” form of bigotry is less prevalent, prejudice continues to exist in more subtle, more indirect and less overtly negative forms,’ Dr Gaertner and Dr Dovidio assert in ‘Prejudice, Discrimination and Racism,’ published recently by Academic Press. ‘People who believe they are unprejudiced will act with bias in some situations, but give some other, rational reason to justify the prejudiced act,’ Dr Gaertner said in an interview.^98.

98. The New York Times, Science Section, by Dr Daniel Goleman