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What is the worst ethnic joke you have ever heard?
 
 

Prejudice.
 
 

By Jose Mancayo, Pedro Beltran, and Nichole Tucker

Prejudice: A judgment or opinion formed before the facts are known.

Racism: An irrational belief in or advocacy of the superiority of a given group, people, or nation, usually of one's own on the basis of racial differences having no scientific validity.

In order to understand what each of these are, one must first understand where it originates from. Prejudice and Racism are developed or learned from these places:

Family
School
Friends
Media

The most important of these is family. At the early stages of life, a child can learn prejudice, racism, and stereotypes that will most often be carried throughout their lives. We learn prejudice and stereotypes from our parents.

"Prejudice was not taught by the parent but was caught by the child from an infected atmosphere." --The Nature of Prejudice

Children develop a fear of the strange in which anything that is different is ultimately feared on some level or another. One example of this is when strangers "grab" for a child. Another example of things that a child may fear due to it's strangeness to him/her, is someone who wears eyeglasses or has strangely colored hair. This stage seems to occur as early as six months of age. It should be stated that fear of the strange does not necessarily mean that the child will always be afraid of that particular "occurance". Eventually a child will grow out of this, however it does help, in a way, to develop specific attitudes about specific things that are "out of the ordinary".
 
 

It is in this stage that that child begins to realize different skin colors and associate them with terms such as "clean" or "dirty" depending on what they learn from their parents or school teachers.
 
 

In this stage, the child begins to realize words and phrases that become "power words" such as "nigger" which create a reaction from someone, either a teacher, parent or the person that the child is speaking to. These terms are not necessarily expressions of anger or fear or any other emotion. They are simply for reactional purposes. In fact, the child doesn't even truly comprehend, at this time, the nature of what they are saying.

There are two main stages in learning prejudice. Within each of those stages are several substages. The following is a breakdown of those stages.
 
 

Stage 1: Identification
The child identifies with either the mother or the
father and desires their attention.In order to gain
this attention, they begin to follow all the rules and
examples set before them. The child learns "a
habit of obedience".

Stage 2: Circumspection
The child "learns to be circumspect". There is no
fear of strangers any longer. They develop a
sense of "loyalty" to their immediate family and do
not stray from this group.

Stage 3: Awareness
The child understands that everyone is different, but
is not exactly sure what those differences mean or
how to classify people according to these differences.

Stage 4: Linguistic Tags
The child learns that certain groups are "hateworthy"
and has an "emotional" understanding. The child,
however, lacks a "referential" understanding. Labels are
established during this time and are used, but not
in a correct manner.
 
 

Stage 1: Total Rejection
In this stage, the child finally has a refential understanding
of which groups are to be liked and which are to be
rejected or cast aside. Once this is established, the
child overgeneralizes the rejection to EVERYONE in that
group regardless of if they are nice or what have you.

Stage 2: Differentiation
In this stage, escape clauses are developed in which
the child begins to use sentences like "My best friend is
Jewish" . These statements are used to make exceptions
for deviations from the total rejection (above).

--Taken from The Nature of Prejudice, Chapter 18 "The Young Child".

Some important studies on group conflict have been done throughout the course of psychological history. Most notably is the experiment by Muzafer Sherif.
In this experiment, Sherif focused on a group relations in a camp setting. His first observation was to see how the boys became a coherent group. The boys were split into two different groups after their arrival. He observed that in each group, they developed special nicknames and even had leaders. Each group was given a symbol and a name that was then printed on camp shirts and caps. As predicted, the two groups began to conflict when one or both of the groups felt "threatened" by the other's presence. His goal now was to see how to create harmony and stabilize the angst among the two. Both groups were then invited on a field trip to a lake some distance away requiring that they ride in a large truck. They rigged the truck so that the truck would not start in which the boys eventually stopped fighting, and began to work together as a team. They grabbed some rope and pulled the truck to a start. All rivals became friends.

--Taken from Readings About the Social Animal, 7th ed. (1956) Chapter 28, Experiments in Group Confict.
 
 

Allport, G. (1954). The young child. In The Nature of Prejudice.

Sherif, M. (1956). Experiments in group conflict. In Readings about the
Social Animal. 7th ed.