The Causes of Reasonable and Unreasonable Prejudice

Some prejudice is reasonable; if I see a snake I assume it to be poisonous unless it can be positively identified as a non-poisonous type, if I see a wild mushroom I will not eat it until it has been positively identified as an edible type, if someone is a member of a religion whose founder has declared that a moral wrong is acceptable if it is in the best interests of that religion then I will be circumspect in my dealings with said individual.

Other prejudice is less reasonable: I once took an instant dislike to a man I had never met before. When I discovered the reason, my dislike evaporated immediately. The man bore an uncanny resemblance to an SS officer in a movie I had seen some weeks before.

I think there is some value in getting to the bottom of two widespread, and in my opinion, grossly absurd prejudices that are very common.

  1. Prejudice against black people

When I read C.G.Jung’s explanation of this (actually an explanation of his own theory mentioning this prejudice in passing), I was immediately convinced that he was right. The following is my interpretation rather than his explanation.

As individuals there is a conflict between what we want and what we find to be socially acceptable. We repress those sides of ourselves that are found to be unacceptable.

However, these wants and characteristics do not simply disappear, they are relegated to the unconscious and try to force their way back to the top sometimes through dreams and fantasies. As such, they evolve from the darkness and the primitive (i.e. unacceptable and repressed) parts of ourselves appear in dark or shadowy forms often dark-coloured people. (I note that mediaeval paintings showed devils as being dark, often also resembling peoples. It is reasonable to assume that some of these, particularly those originating from the UK and Northern Europe were painted by people who had never actually seen a negro.

The association of darkness with evil is well established in our language: black magic, dark forces, shadowy characters etc. and, conversely, white witch, white lie, fair-minded.

Where the repression is sexual in nature, it is clear that that the figure representing it will be associated with whatever expression of sexuality is considered morally wrong.

This theory would explain a couple of observable phenomena:

  1. Black men accused of (particularly) sexual offences are frequently assumed to be guilty where a white man would not be.
  2. The same prejudice exists in dark-skinned people themselves. (You have to look for evidence of this, but it is there. I would cite the book “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin who pretended to be black to see what life really was like for negroes in the Southern US in the 1930s (?) as a source of evidence for this statement.)

I would suggest that a large part of the solution to this unfortunate phenomenon is simply to recognize its causes. Which is why I am saying all this.

  1. Prejudice Against Men and in Favour of Women

Every third rate artist has in his repertoire the image of “Madonna and Child.” While most of these paintings are about as interesting as the bowl of fruit that appears on the next canvas, we can all see what is being alluded to: the deep-seated sense of female saintliness, something that is probably due to distant memories on our own mother’s love. In the real, adult world, women who are not your mother are likely to benefit from your preconception that they do indeed share your own mother’s holiness. This prejudice endures despite all the accumulating evidence to the contrary.

In a normal nuclear family, the father’s traditional role of bread winner is necessary so that the mother can devote her attention to her children. The father’s role, while just as important, has far less emotional impact. Logically, if he is risking his life doing really nasty or dangerous work, his input could be considered more noble than that of the actual mother.

What is required here, in my opinion, is not simply a recognition of the dangerous work men often do to support their families; men are far more likely to work in arduous, dirty and dangerous conditions than women and they do this out of a love that is known in the mind but is less visceral than the feminine expression of love. What is required, is a return to the rites of passage in which the child breaks away from the mother to become an adult in a clean a clear ritual.