Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, November 24, 2023.
No one can successfully avoid them. They creep into our lives with great stealth and energy. It is human nature that this process is universal. But we can become conscious of them, so they show themselves in their shaping and framing power to create who we are.
I am referring to the power of prejudices and their offspring: assumptions, opinions, hunches, a felt sense of things, inheritances from others, negative thoughts and feelings. The meaning of prejudice—to cause “injury, physical harm”—arises in the mid 14th.century, as does the legal sense of “detriment or damage caused by the violation of a legal right.”
The meaning, “preconceived opinion” (especially but not necessarily unfavorable) is from late 14th. century in English; now usually understood as a “decision formed without due examination of the facts or arguments necessary to a just and impartial decision” (www.etymology.com). “To terminate with extreme prejudice,” meaning to “kill,” is by 1972, its most frequent description.
Many meanings cluster around the above history of the word. I am focusing though on “preconceived opinion.” It connotes a view that one forms with often only a tenuous connection to reality. Prejudices can certainly protect us from facing what might be distasteful or injurious to our sense of identity, to our unique world view, and to internal clusters of beliefs that harden into fixed positions with no latitude for flexibility.
We sense that prejudices are extremely effective in creating and sustaining tribal thought and behavior because prejudices often label without knowing, or knowing fully, or knowing the truth over against a deception. Then we often tend to fill in what we don’t know with assumptions, stereotypes, diagrams of grouping and collecting others into a mass audience with few differences or distinctions. In short, absent particulars.
Prejudices, I sense, also flourish in the darkness of a fearful life or are created to generate fear and loathing of that ever-present specter: “the Other.” In prejudice, the soul aligns itself with an image that is in a questionable equilibrium with a shared commons sense of things as they are. It may then create or manufacture its own reality to coincide with its own idea of reality.
Cultural observer and critic Brooke Gladstone reminds us in her provocative book, The Trouble with Reality, “Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.” I take this as a given, and yet we know that reality can extend out from the personal.
Dispelling prejudices rests on a new level of awareness and a generous accommodation of otherness. We may say “I am willing to accommodate this reality without agreeing with it or attacking it.” Which makes me wonder: Can a prejudice we hold allow us to see more, not less. I say this because prejudice does not have to be an exclusively negative judgement. One can be positively prejudiced towards learning, towards helping others, toward practicing resiliency.
Finally, our prejudices are mythic, that is to say, they assist us in shaping, forming and creating what gives our lives coherence, order and arrangement. They help us align our interior lives with the outer world we inhabit. One might then ask:
What does a prejudice, assumption, opinion, or belief I hold block me from seeing?
Is a prejudice I cling to a strategy not to face a part of myself that needs to be explored? Is there something or someone I hate that is entangled within a prejudice that haunts me, but I have not been able to face?
Such explorations can be a first step to opening a realm of ourselves we may find rewarding to explore.