Читать книгу Understanding Racism - Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl - Страница 21

In the 1950s, when the book The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon W. Allport was published, the United States had recently confronted the atrocities of World War II and was facing difficult racial, ethnic, and religious tensions at home. The United States, like many other postindustrial nations, was experiencing success in advancing technology and growing national wealth but was not achieving similar successes in combating prejudice. Moreover, the increasingly global nature of capitalism was bringing disparate groups closer together, and as Allport states, “nations once safely separated by barricades of water or mountains are exposed to each other by air … products of the modern age have thrown human groups into each others’ [sic] laps. We have not yet learned how to adjust to our new mental and moral proximity.”¹ Given these intersecting social landscapes and the prevalence of group animosities, an explanation was needed for the persistence of prejudice.

Allport culled together wide-ranging scholarship on prejudice and discrimination to propose a framework for understanding prejudice and to set a foundation for future work. While in his book, Allport states that bias can have a positive or negative connotation, his focus is on negative bias, with particular attention paid to religious and ethnic prejudice. He then explores discrimination, which is prejudice manifested in action.