Читать книгу Understanding Racism - Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl - Страница 35

The limitation of a focus on prejudice is that the analysis does not clearly indicate why some groups are chosen as targets of prejudice and others are not. It also does not explain how some groups are able to progress through a period of targeted prejudice to eventually become accepted, while others are not. The Nature of Prejudice tends to focus on Black communities and Jewish communities (which makes sense, given that the book was published in the 1950s, when anti-Black and anti-Jewish sentiment was high), but there’s no rigorous theoretical explanation as to why these two groups are persistently the targets of prejudice. Likewise, there’s no reason given as to why Irish communities, who had previously been seen as different and had experienced severe discrimination, then came to be accepted by Whites. Prejudice, as a theoretical concept, tends to lack a sophisticated analysis of power that could help explain the structure of hierarchies. Overall, the strength of prejudice as an explanatory perspective is more on the individual, psychological level, while its theoretical limitation is in addressing power differentials, hierarchies, evolution in racial group dynamics, and similar processes.