prejudice

   Legally meaning ‘damage’, prejudice more commonly implies an irrational pre-conceived opinion. The eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison’s reference to ‘natural prejudices’ would now be thought odd, as it has been socially outrageous to admit prejudice since the late 1960s. The law forbids bias on grounds of race, gender or marital status (but not age), and some employers voluntarily add sexual orientation and disability. There are contested exceptions for the armed forces. Demands by the disabled for access have been made with increasing vigour. All these issues have been championed by supporters of political correctness who hope to change attitudes by abolishing certain ideas or words, believing that a rose by any other name would smell completely different.

   The effectiveness of this approach is debatable since prejudice is not easy to quantify when most prejudice is secret. Some people bemoan what they call ‘the race relations industry’, resentfully accusing it of giving unfair advantages to minorities. In reality, its influence is also doubtful and new prejudices evolve unexpectedly. In 1997 there were incidents of anti-white Asian violence in west London, where violence between Sikhs and Muslims had been developing for several years. The Nation of Islam movement in New York, which is black, anti-Jewish, anti-white and preaches apartheid for blacks, established itself in London in 1995 but has yet to gain many converts. Prejudices not generally discussed seem to be subject to different criteria to those against groups more usually seen as having grievances. Men are abused by feminists and this is apparently acceptable, but a men’s movement grew up in the early 1990s to fight back. The movement has not been taken very seriously, except inasmuch as there are those who are prepared to weep for their fathers or childhoods. Years of unemployment and rising crime in Liverpool have made Scousers a target. Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the Salman Rushdie Affair have provoked anti-Islamic prejudice.

   Some prejudices are acceptable. Hostility to the aristocracy, monarchy, big business, or even estate agents is explicable, if possibly unfair. Similarly, the 1988 anti-apartheid song ‘I’ve never met a nice South African’ would have been banned if it attacked almost any other nation. Hippies, trainspotters and collectors of obscure facts known since 1988 as ‘anoraks’ are also targets. Why these largely harmless people attract so much venom, unless it is their cultural isolationism, remains mysterious in the face of supreme viciousness and pomposity on display elsewhere. Society and social relations appear to foster prejudices, even if only against our neighbours.

   Further reading

    Bohm, D. (1996) On Dialogue, London: Routledge (leading physicist and thinker explains how to examine prejudices and assumptions).

   STEPHEN KERENSKY