The Many Prejudices We Ignore

Most people who consider themselves to be liberal, educated citizens, are sensitive to any kind of prejudice against racial or religious groups. They guard against making any statements themselves that could be considered to fall in those categories, and they are quick to heap opprobrium on anyone they hear mouthing such prejudices. That’s all well and good. But meanwhile, these very same people are often guilty of harboring other forms of prejudice that can be just as destructive of our social fabric. Let me cite an awakening example.

A group of us from “Friends of the Library” had booked a bus tour to different branch libraries. Almost all the people in the group were retired women from more affluent Chicago neighborhoods or suburbs. However there was one somewhat younger person in the group, a demographic rarity in this context for being under retirement age, for being a man, and for being black.

We were all standing around outside the central library, waiting for the rented motor coach to get revved up. One of the more mature ladies in the group, a spruce matron in a neatly tailored suit, approached the black man and cheerily asked him if he was our bus driver. The moment froze. With vast indignation, the man issued a smarting correction. “No, madam,” he adjured. “I’m a member of the library group.”

The women immediately saw how she had been guilty of a terrible faux pas – and worse. She had been guilty of what might be construed as racial profiling and of the basest form of racial prejudice. She’d been guilty of assuming that the one black man in the group must of necessity be there only to perform some task regarded as being manual labor. A pall was cast over the day’s adventures for all of us who had been within earshot of this social blunder.

And yet, and yet – when I thought about it, it seemed to me that the man was more guilty of prejudice than the woman. Why did the suggestion that he was a bus driver affront him so much? Well yes, there might have been some legitimacy to his taking exception to the stereotyping of black men as laborers. But his indignation went beyond any such abstract historical considerations. He just did not want to be taken for a mere blue collar worker. It was obvious that he considered such work beneath him. He viewed himself as being a person with literary interests. He was an intellectual far removed from working stiffs who drove busses or wielded jackhammers and whom he no doubt automatically considered to be too dumb to appreciate any of the “finer” things in life.

But isn’t that sort of attitude as unworthy a prejudice as some of the other prejudices that we more often revile? There is perhaps something understandable about a black man taking that attitude. Black people were for so long generally confined to jobs involving hard labor, that now they want to distance themselves as much as possible from any such association. But white people feel the same way. Any banker, whether white or black, would likely be insulted to be taken for the janitor in his bank. But why? If it’s wrong to assume that anyone who is black has less worth than anyone who is white – why is it right to assume that anyone who is a bus driver has less worth than anyone who is a library patron? That sort of dismissal of bus drivers seems to be part of a larger class prejudice that lingers in this society and that is all the more pernicious because it is so widely held and even so socially acceptable.

There’s a similarly ubiquitous prejudice that virtually no one objects to. Men predictably want to dissociate themselves from anything feminine, because for them, femininity is a lesser state. In another essay on this Blog, I wrote how disappointed I was that President Obama spurned certain breeds of dogs because they were too “girlie.” If he had spurned some breed of dog because it was traditionally associated with African-Americans and if he had expressed that opinion by using some belittling term for young African-Americans – it’s likely his right to continue in the Presidential office would have been called into question. If he had said, “Oh yuck no! Not THAT kind of dog. That’s too pickaninny!” – there might even have been a call for his impeachment. But since his slur was only against women, everyone, including his wife sitting next to him, just chuckled indulgently.

This kind of devaluing of women is so widespread in our society and in most societies, that it’s part of the very air we breathe. Men routinely make a show of shunning anything pink, anything frilly, anything decorative, anything at all typically associated with women, because they consider it beneath them and because it would indeed make them the target of merciless ribbing and derision. But again, imagine replacing that display of aversion with an aversion to anything stereotypically associated with black people. By making that substitution, the level of prejudice inherent in the attitude becomes apparent.

Imagine a man refusing to eat collard greens because they’ve been associated with black people. “Oh no! I won’t eat THAT! That’s what black people eat!” If a man made such a remark, and if he were a public figure – the uproar against him would be immediate and massive. The man might be called to resign whatever post he held and he would be made to make a series of abject, tearful apologies. But when his aversion is only towards things associated with women, everyone smiles, colludes with, and even encourages, his repelling fervor. “Yeah man, you definitely gotta toss that apron!”

This sort of prejudice against women is so pervasive that it calls for treatment in a series of separate essays. Where is Gloria Steinem when we need her the most? For now though, it’s enough to note that there is widespread prejudice against members of the working class and against women, and against all kinds of people regarded as being unattractive. It’s OK to be vocally prejudiced against all these groups. Everyone feels free to voice these prejudices, knowing there will be no repercussions, only general understanding and endorsement.

But going even beyond these specific unacknowledged prejudices, there’s a still more encompassing prejudice that’s so embedded in the way we think that it’s virtually invisible and untouchable. I was brought up short and made to realize I harbored just such a prejudice by a particularly revolutionary remark that someone made to me. We were walking along near the University of Chicago when we passed a white couple who veering off to a parked car. The man leaned in to ominously warn the woman, “Lock all the car doors as soon as you get in, honey. There are lots of blacks around here.”

When my companion and I had passed beyond earshot of this other, so clearly benighted and stupid couple, I voiced my opinion of them. “Well, there are two I’d like to lock my doors against!” I sneered.

My companion looked at me with an admonishing twinkle in his eye and said, “Well, they’re good for something at least. They gave you a chance to feel superior.”

There it was! The word has become a cliché, but it’s the only one I can think of to describe what I had. The word is “epiphany.” Yes, I had felt superior to that couple. I’d felt a sweet little surge of “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. I’m better than you!” in the wake of the man’s remark. And isn’t that at the base of a lot of our vociferous condemnation of those who express any kind of politically incorrect sentiment? We are secretly glad of their infraction because it gives us a chance to feel so superior to them, and to demonstrate that superiority by denouncing them.

That’s the very definition of prejudice. It’s a reflex feeling of spurning superiority towards someone, not because of who they are in the fullness of their being, but because of some single stamped characteristic they exhibit, which is often a characteristic they’ve had little or no control over acquiring.

I don’t mean that we should condone racism or any of the other forms of prejudice to which our society is sensitive. But at the same time, we should recognize that there is an overarching, unacknowledged prejudice that might be operative in the very eagerness with which we dismiss others for their infractions. If all we do is make another’s person’s remark the occasion for us to gloat in superiority over them, then we are exhibiting the very kind of prejudice that we are ostensibly fighting. We’re using another person simply as a means of boosting our own egos by making a show of our rejection. Giving ourselves a satisfying fillip of superiority won’t do much do eradicate the other person’s prejudice, while at the same time it merely entrenches us in a more encrypted prejudice of our own.

This is all the more true because our allowance of prejudiced remarks is so unequally distributed. We applaud black rappers for saying the kinds of things that would cause us to permanently banish white suburbanites forever from our social circle. Black rappers are given free rein to make violently prejudiced remarks against women, against whites, against other blacks. Issuing from them, the remarks are considered artistic expression, or a commentary on their mean streets upbringing, or a complicated product of their history as members of a certain race.

But a white person making comparable remarks is given no such dispensation. We don’t stop to consider that they too might be products of very compromising environments. A good ol’ boy acquaintance of mine who’d been helping me with household repairs happened to drop in on a charity luncheon I was giving at my house. He was a fish out of water from the start, but then, in response to a strained attempt on the part of one of the other luncheon guests to reach out to him with a question about his work – he responded, sort of sheepishly abashed by this alien attention. He said that he did “a black man’s work, toting stuff, working off the strength of his back.”

That broke it. The society lady walked out of my house in high dudgeon. She called me the next day and said she would not tolerate that obvious kind of racial prejudice. She wondered why on earth I associated with such a person and she intimated that she had doubts about ever again visiting the home of anyone who did associate with such people.

Well, there was a lot wrong with that whole round-about of prejudice. While my handyman’s remark showed a habit of making a separate class out of blacks – the charity matron’s reaction showed an equal habit of making a special class out of rural whites. (Actually, the handyman was half Native American. If the society matron had known that, would she have taken a more lenient attitude towards him? Would status as a Native American, like the status of black rap artist, have been enough to have given him allowance to make prejudiced comments?) But in any case, as much as the handyman had demonstrated a habit of putting blacks in their place – the society matron showed a parallel habit of putting poor southern whites in their place, a place that she’d enforce as being distinctively separate from any place she ever occupied. I suspect that society matron, although she was white, would have also been offended if anyone had taken her for a maid in my household – showing how much she considered maids to be beneath her.

I knew the handyman better than just that one remark of his. I knew a little more of his context. He told me how growing up in the Carolinas sixty years previously, the adults in his family had instructed him in the social mores of the place. They had told him that he was always to address white people as “Mr. And Mrs …..,” but that he should address black people by their first names only. He had been the child of his father’s second marriage. When his father’s first wife had died at the age of twenty-one, after having given birth to the couple’s third child – his father had married a fourteen-year-old Cherokee woman although she didn’t reveal her Cherokee ancestry until years later because she was deeply ashamed of her non-White status. She promptly started to have children, one of whom was the handyman.

The handyman spoke highly of his father, mostly because his father had tried to bring him and his siblings up strictly according to the Bible. When his father had caught him and his brother playing during the time they should have been reading the Bible, the man had taken them out behind the barn and beaten them to a fare-thee-well with a chain. His younger brother had received a bad head injury in the process and had always been a little “slow” after that. But still the handyman respected his father for making such valiant efforts to set them on the straight and narrow. Later on, his sister had tried to poison their father because he was always “messing” with her. But the handyman thought his sister’s reaction had been extreme. He said all the fathers he knew back then had been likely to “mess with their daughters.” It was just the way of things.

Talk about mean streets! If black rappers have the right to make vicious, prejudiced remarks because of the hard way they and their people have come – it would seem my handyman might also qualify for such dispensation. But the point is certainly not to fight for the right to make prejudiced remarks. The point is that not all the prejudice we need to fight against is the kind of prejudice that has been so roundly defined and targeted over the last decades. When civil rights leaders say that we still have a long way to go in conquering prejudice – they’re right. But there’s a lot of prejudice that few people have even begun to recognize, much less started to address in their lamentations.

Again, the goal should not be to condone any sort of prejudice against minorities, but neither should our goal be to simply assume a high-and-mighty sense of superiority over someone who is struggling against ignorance and a bleak family background. If we judge people based on one snippet we hear issue from them, we do the very thing we inveigh against. If we in effect say to them, “Step off the sidewalk when I walk by. I, in all my glory, am superior and have the right-of-way,” we are hardly better than the many prejudiced white people who have come to symbolize southern society in the 1930’s. We are in effect becoming our own sort of clansmen.

Rather than immediately putting anyone in his place because of an errant remark or because of a perceived lifestyle that we reflexively dislike, we should strive to know that person more fully. Whether that person is black, white, a woman, Jewish, fat, gay, old, a teenager, a prostitute, a maid, a redneck, a Wall Street broker, or a bus driver – we shouldn’t give ourselves a cheap shot of self-satisfaction with a display of disapproval and distancing. Rather we should eagerly approach that person with a sense that a new adventure in knowing the human spirit awaits us.