"We carry the baggage of prejudices from childhood and formative years. Unless we confront and make peace with them, they will lead us down the path of discrimination..!"
We all have prejudices, even those of us who are prejudiced against prejudices. In fact, it is our prejudices that distinguish us from each other, that enable us to come closer to each other, that enable us to stay away from each other, that enable us to hate each other, that enable us to love each other and that enable us to fear each other. Our prejudices could be socially low impact such as being prejudiced in favour of vegetarianism or against consumption of alcohol and tobacco, or they could be socially high impact such as ethnic, racial and religious prejudices. But whatever the the social impact, we hold on our prejudices intensely and sometimes, privately. Though in the last two decade or two, we have tended to be more articulate about them, often wearing them on our sleeves, even taking pride in them.
Search all the dictionaries you want, and you will come across one common element in the various definitions of prejudice - irrationality. And search literature in any language and you will find that prejudices have always been rich source material for littérateurs, authors and philosophers. They are therefore not recent phenomena. A prejudice can be thought of as an adverse judgment that has been arrived at without a full examination of all the fact at our disposal. In other words, it is a value judgment that we easily make based on half-facts and half-truths with a mind that is preconditioned to readily accept such a judgment. Put differently, we are emotionally primed to come to a certain conclusion that we look for "facts" to support this "sense" that we have. This "sense" comes from a closely related phenomenon - Stereotypes.
Battered stereotypes
From childhood our minds are battered by stereotypical images and ideas we carry about a whole range of things and peoples.The stereotypes come from our parents, other family members, teachers, peers, friends, political leaders, the media and from our own personal emotional experiences. Therefore, we grow up with half-formed feelings, which may or may not have become full-fledged beliefs: that the West is decadent, all south Indians eat only idli and sambar, all Punjabis are aggressive, all Bengalis are temperamental, all Germans are Nazis, all multi-nationals are exploitative, all drinkers are alcoholics and so on. More often than not, the circumstances of our life may never call upon us to even examine, let alone challenge these half-formed feelings based on stereotypes.
But one day, when out of the blue, your son wants to marry a German or your granddaughter joins a multinational, then you are forced, whether you are ready or not, to come face to face with your hitherto-dormant prejudices and deal with them. Otherwise the only option available to you is to rant, feel distressed, feel hurt by someone you love or even cut the loved one out of your life. From the foregoing it may be evident that for a dormant, half-formed stereotype-based feeling to mushroom into a full-fledged prejudice, a catalyst is required. More often than not, the catalyst is fear. When we are faced with a situation where we experience some form of emotional discomfort dictated by fear of loss (loss of self, of identity, of loved one, of dignity, of stability, of predictability), our dormant prejudices are activated into full-blown active prejudices and will from that moment on impact our conscious thought and processes until we have made our peace with them. And they will lead us down the path of discrimination, resulting in polarisation, factionalism and eventually fundamentalism.
The process of making our peace with our prejudices is not so simple and requires committed introspection and a supportive emotional environment. Before we hasten to “eliminate” our prejudices, we need to realise that some of our prejudices can actually be beneficial to us. For example, if one is prejudiced against alcohol consumption, this may actually be a protective mechanism to prevent one from going down the road to alcoholism like one’s father did. Of course, the prejudice precludes the possibility of one being part of a cocktail circuit, but this may be a small price to pay for prevention of alcoholism, knowing that this disorder does tend to run in families. So, in the first instance we need to make a distinction between “adaptive prejudices” such as the one just described and “maladaptive prejudices”. The latter are usually much harder to be rational about, held with more emotional than intellectual intensity and may sometimes actually place the holder in a position of personal or professional disadvantage such as loss of a child who either elopes or commits suicide when we refuse to permit her/him to marry someone affiliated to the religion we are prejudiced against or the loss of a wonderful career opportunity because our homophobic prejudice refuses to permit us to work for a gay boss. Some of our prejudices may only be based on what our parents taught us from the way they lived their lives. Their prejudices become ours merely through a process of osmosis. These “osmosed prejudices” are the easiest to deal with, for there is not too much energy surrounding them. Many of our other prejudices will have roots in our adolescent and young-adult years when our personal life experiences started becoming more substantial. For instance, an adverse experience with a person belonging to a particular community or ethnic affiliation may be traumatic enough to leave a scar in one’s mind that ends up blighting all those belonging to that sub-group.
First step
When dealing with our active and maladaptive prejudices, we first need to “own” them. Our prejudices do make us who we are and they are very much part of us. Denying their existence is futile, however much of an intellectual or a rationalist we may believe we are. We then need to try and trace our prejudices back to their origins. And finally having understood where they came from, we can then decide what we want to do with them. Do we hang on to them, do we let them go or do we wear them on our sleeves with pride? Frankly I have found that letting them go is the most mentally healthy option, for, it makes us less fearful and less irrational. Also this gives us an opportunity to experience a greater sense of inner peace. Sadly, many of us tend to derive pride in our prejudices today. Happily, it is possible to stop doing so in the interest of our personal growth and development. What will you do?
The writer is a psychiatrist and author..... VIJAY NAGASWAMI