Prejudice, strictly defined, is a preformed and unsubstantiated judgment or opinion about an individual or a group, either favorable or unfavorable in nature. In modern usage, however, the term most often denotes an unfavorable or hostile attitude toward other people based on their membership in another social or ethnic group. The distinguishing characteristic of a prejudice is that it relies on stereotypes (oversimplified generalizations) about the group against which the prejudice is directed.
Examples of prejudice abound in history. In most cases, a prejudiced attitude held by a dominant ethnic group against a minority or disadvantaged group within the same society results in various forms of discrimination. The most elaborate kind of discrimination is segregation—the isolation of ethnic groups enforced by law or custom or both. Examples of segregation include the strict confinement of Jews to the ghettos of medieval European cities and the rigid race-separation laws of modern-day South Africa, but segregation can also apply to the exclusion of a member of a minority group from social clubs or from access to particular jobs or educational opportunities. Integration, the mixing of ethnic groups, might be expected to lead to the rapid disappearance of prejudice, on the theory that prolonged contact between people should destroy stereotypes. In practice, however, prejudiced attitudes often have proved extremely difficult to eradicate, even when integration is enforced by law (Jance, 1997).
In the history of racial prejudice in the United States, statistics have been important to the dominant white culture. As long as small numbers of any one group could be confined to a certain area, and took the jobs native-born Americans and assimilated groups no longer wanted, they did not attract much attention.
A lot of research has been done on the origins of prejudice. How does it arise? To summaries the....
