A good quote to remember

[velvetpage]

A great deal of racism, homophobia, etc., happens not because anyone particularly wants to be racist or homophobic, but because the ground has been tilted that way by arrangements made long ago and if you’re not constantly on the lookout it’s easiest to roll downhill. From here.

Comments

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

Thanx 4 that. Fascinating.....

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Oh hell yeah, that sounds true. It describes my own homophobia during my early adult years. It also describes the racism that many of my white peers one city over still nurtured in 1980s.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It's basically a rephrasing of Hanlon's Razor, where the stupidity came before you and you're just going along with it. It certainly explained my own homophobia in my late teens and into my twenties.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Something like. However, we really need to stop referring to this sort of prejudice as stupidity. It both tends to make us see those who hold the prejudice as below us, inferior, and, perhaps, beyond hope. The other problem is that by seeing such codes "stupid", we under rate their power. Part of what makes prejudice hard to combat is its fearsome cognitive efficiency. Prejudice and over generalization are very fast in terms of processing in categorization and classification problems. Wrong and injurious to the people holding prejudice, but fast nonetheless. We tend to interpret this speed as certainty and certainty comforts. The other issue with prejudice is that it's very bound up with rules and social norms. Again, we tend to underestimate the role and power of social(group) norms. They're essential to how a group stays together and functions. In fact, an author I'm reading right now refers to norms as "the grammar of society". Overthrowing both norms and prejudice requires a complete upending of the individual's internal world model and his or her entire way of assembling messages out of information conveyed through social channels.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

You're absolutely right.