Education, Prejudice and Discrimination: A Study in Readiness for Desegregation

EARLIER notions of the relation between prejudice and discrimination held them to be closely interdependent. Discrimination, it was often assumed, was practiced by the prejudiced person and could not be eliminated except as prejudice was first removed.' More recent research and theory have been very persuasive, however, in the suggestion that there exists between the attitude of prejudice and the action of discrimination a gap in which a variety of facilitating or inhibiting factors can be interposed. In short, between private feeling and public action there is room for the play of other factors which significantly influence the extent to which feeling will be translated into matching action or will be repressed on behalf of other values. Law, custom, conscience and informal community restraints are the types of factors which can and have been interposed.2 Even the most ardent advocates of legal action will admit, however, that it is questionable how enduring or stable are purely legal restraints in preventing the translation of prejudice into discrimination. Unless deeper commitments oppose prejudices, one must be seriously concerned.3 Yet we also know that prejudice will not easily, if ever, yield to the blandishments of rational evidence. Nor is emotional re-education a feasible public alternative. We are therefore led to seek other factors which may be invoked to help counterbalance the impulses and drives generated by emotionally-rooted prejudices, and which may effectively modify behavior without necessarily altering the prejudices themselves. If these factors are to become instruments of public policy, they must be able to be developed reasonably quickly and at relatively low cost. A clue is given to us by the studies of the impact of formal education upon behavior in a variety of contexts. For the literature is rich with suggestions that as formal education increases there tend to occur noticeable shifts from: (a) nationalism to internationalism, in political point of view; (b) traditionalism to secularism, in general social philosophy; (c) common sense to science, as acceptable evidence; (d) punishment to reform, in penological theory; (e) violence and direct action to law, as agents of policy; (f) rigidity to permissiveness, in child rearing; (g) patriarchy to democracy, in spouse relationships; (h) anesthesia to creativity, in patterns of recreation. A common feature of these changes is that they imply the development of an awareness by the individual that there are: (a) other places than his own locality; (b) other times than the immediate present; (c) persons other than himself and his immediate primary group; and (d) other values he cherishes as ingredients of other aspects of his self. In brief, the individual who experiences these changes has enlarged his perspectives on time, place, person and values. This enlargement, the literature suggests, occurs somehow as a result of pro1 For a thorough review of the major viewpoints, see G. W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954. For more specialized surveys of related problems, see J. S. Brunner and R. Tagiuri, "The Perception of People" in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 634-654, Cambridge, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1954; and J. Harding, B. Kutner, H. Proshansky and I. Chein, "Prejudice and Ethnic Relations," ibid., pp. 1021-1061. 2 For analysis of the "vicious circle" and the effectiveness of interpositions at various points, see, for example, R. K. Merton, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy," Chapter VII, in his Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1949; and R. M. MacIver's The More Perfect Union, New York: Macmillan, 1948. 3 The best full-length analysis of the role of law in ethnic relations is Morroe Berger's Equality by Statute, New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. See also his excellent article, "Desegregation, Law and Social Science," Commentary, 23 (May, 1957), pp. 471-477; and his Racial Equality and the Law, Paris: UNESCO, 1954.