by J L Petriesan

Created on: November 11, 2008

Can we unlearn prejudice?

Yes, we can. At least I think we can. Or at least we can act as if we are not prejudiced.

Prejudice is simply pre-judging someone based on some characteristic, whether that characteristic is gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, religion, disability, or education level, place of residence. . .basically anything that can be used to differentiate people.

To some degree or another, we all have prejudices. To say one's particular prejudice, say against Ivy-League educated MBA's, is more innocuous than another's prejudice against any darker-skinned person wearing a turban is ridiculous. The acts one engages in because of that prejudice is the measuring stick.

Prejudice, because of its very nature is the child of ignorance. It is a pre-judging, which presumes and requires a judgment formed before knowledge is obtained. When we are being questioned to be on a jury, often we are asked if we have come to a conclusion regarding the guilt or innocence of the defendant or if we have read or seen or heard anything which so colors our judgment as to render fair and impartial consideration of the facts impossible. In other words, are we prejudiced against the defendant?

Just as in court, as we acquire knowledge of someone with whom we have no previous experience, we are entitled to form our own opinions, and so long as these opinions about a specific person do not extend to any identifiable class of people (say, all darker-skinned persons wearing turbans) or based on people with other similar identifiers, then we are not prejudiced. We either like or dislike the particular person based on our personal interactions with them.

Yeah, but this is missing the point, isn't it? Not really. I have a friend who was mugged by a group of (fill in your ethnicity of choice here) people not of his race. He allowed himself to transfer his very reasonable dislike to these individuals to all members of this particular race. However, because he deals with members of this race in business, he has many close friends who are also members of this race.

So, is he prejudiced or not? I would answer "No." because he has not let a bad experience color his interaction with all people of this race.

This is not a clean line. Very few things in life are.

Perhaps one way of "unlearning" prejudice is to pretend one is not prejudiced. Yes, pretend. Acknowledge the problem and act as if you do not have it. Over time, it will slip away or bury itself so far in the dark realms of our lizard-brain we will find we no longer act on our prejudices and when this happens, when our Ego essentially short-circuits the Id, I believe we no longer have that specific prejudice.

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