When Prejudice Is So Malleable

By Patricia J. Williams for The New York Times:

The finding that white Americans see blacks' progress as an insult or a diminishment of their status is not entirely surprising. Zero-sum formulations of prejudice tend to emerge in lean economic times, fueling cultural or historical rivalries of all sorts.

I have a hunch that if the study had included questions about whether whites feel threatened by "reverse racism" among Asians, Latinos and immigrants, the results would be much the same. Those perceptions notwithstanding, data show that white Americans remain the most privileged human beings on the planet.

The world is changing, however, and the realignment of wealth, power, jobs and resources has been deeply challenging to the notion of American exceptionalism. That exceptionalism, consciously or unconsciously, is infused with racialized hierarchies -- normative whiteness and masculinity still marking the "worthiest" inheritors of the American dream.

Moreover, the downturn in all our fortunes has been relentlessly and poisonously exploited by certain segments of the media. The language of "us" versus "them" dominates far too much of our radio and television discourse. The litany of scapegoats who are supposedly fouling "our" trough includes not just blacks but those of Mexican, Japanese, Korean or Hawaiian descent, non-born-again Christians, the entire People's Republic of China, Canadians, the French, liberal elites and the elderly.

The trickiest thing about prejudice is that it is so malleable, so capable of reinvention. Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton, has documented the varied and fluctuating presentations of social biases like race, class, disability, gender.

She points out that there are nuanced differences in how prejudice is expressed against the disabled as opposed to Asian-Americans, or as against high-status blacks versus poor blacks, or the homeless or those with low-status accents. Elements like pity, resentment, competition, revulsion, paternalism, or fear play against one another in complicated ways.

Read more here.