DEALING WITH PREJUDICE

C. Philip Slate

Gordon W. Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice (1954), though now sixty-six years old, still sets the agenda for scholarly research on prejudice and discrimination. Fifty years after its initial publication a group of forty-four scholars provided essays that celebrated and affirmed Allport’s work.

I read Allport’s work in the late 1960s, to my great benefit. By that time, I had lived in England for nearly a decade. I had learned that prejudice takes all kinds of shapes. Within the UK there were ethnic, regional, religious, and national prejudices, both major and minor. On the European Continent the same phenomena could be observed. I did not need to read Allport to learn that biases, prejudices, and resulting discrimination occur all over the world. The biases of Jews toward Samaritans (John 4:9), and Gentiles in general, lies back of many problems mentioned in the New Testament. What Allport’s work helped me to understand was the way prejudice develops and the difficulties encountered in managing or ridding one’s self of specific unwanted biases.

Allport’s research revealed that prejudices—whether African tribalism, Oriental nationalism, or European regionalism—regardless of their origins, are learned from older people and reinforced by actions, jokes, stories, and the “blessing” of respected family members. They are developed over long periods of time, generation after generation, and people often raise no questions about their validity. For that reason, it is difficult for people to overcome their prejudices quickly and easily. That piece of information helped me to think through my biases and to be understanding with others who, for example, grow up with various prejudices, become serious Christians, and realize a conflict between their biases and their faith. Conquering unwanted biases requires time and usually the intervention of a different ideology. Making laws can render certain behaviors criminal, but legislation does not change prejudicial attitudes, a lesson learned from prohibition laws. Tearing down statues and looting stores are counter-productive, since they likely harden attitudes in some cases.

The Case of Grandma Sones

In 1963 a 75-year-old woman became a Christian in a suburb of London, England. She lived two happy and fruitful years before her death. She took seriously her new faith. Life has been tough for her. She endured two World Wars, had an alcoholic husband (by then deceased) and children who did not speak to each other and rarely visited their mother. During WWII she had a son who was a prisoner of war in Japan. Many years later, when I read Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, I thought about her son. When the war was over, her son, sickly and weak, perhaps even wounded from prison abuse, was put aboard a ship for the UK. Grandma Sones, as we all called her, took a plane out to Egypt to see him when the ship was in the Suez Canal. She was glad she did that, because her son died aboard the ship between Egypt and England. Whom would she blame for her sadness?

Less than two decades later she became a Christian. Our congregation was international; at that time, some eight nations and three races were represented. Additionally, we had many visitors since London was one of the crossroads of the world. Once when I was in her home, with great earnestness she confessed a problem she had. “Brother Philip, I have fears that if Japanese people were to visit us, I would not act right toward them.” I understood, in a measure, how she felt. My home congregation now is in Germantown, TN, but during WWII the name was changed for a period to “Neshoba,” an Indian word meaning “wolf.” Things German were out! Things Japanese were also out. Grandma Sones’s boy had been starved by the “Japanese.” No individual Japanese person, just “Japanese.” That was the only way she could frame the situation. It was corporate dislike. How could she deal with it?

I listened patiently to her and assured her that I understand how she could feel that way. I sought to intervene by re-framing the situation. “Grandma, if any Japanese people visit us, they would almost certainly be Christians who were learning to think like Jesus wants them to think, just as you are. Their lives have been changed, like yours has been. Additionally, unless they are quite old, it is unlikely that they would have been in the military during World War II.” She stated that those perspectives helped her thinking. In retrospect, it was easy to understand her deeply felt prejudice, the hurt that had developed over no less than fourteen years. She had been emotionally abused by “Japanese people’s” behavior. On the other hand, though she never had to deal with the situation, I think she came to terms with the situation because of the intervention of information that helped her to feel better about her perceived ability to deal with the unlikely situation.

My point is that when we preachers and teachers find ourselves dealing with brothers and sisters, and others, whose prejudices are clearly unchristian, we must recognize that those attitudes have likely been developing and reinforced for many years. We must be part of the intervention that helps people to reframe the situation. When the NIV translation came out I was impressed with its acceptable rendering of 2 Tim. 4:2, “Preach the word. ... with great patience and careful instruction.” That is generally what it takes when working with former pagans who begin to grow in Christ, and that is what it takes in helping to cope with their long-held prejudices.

There are many useful steps one can take to help people manage their biases. Yes, manage them. Everyone has biases—the physicist, the rabid atheist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Quakers, and you. It just is not possible to rid ourselves of all biases, nor should we; but it is possible to manage the undesirable ones by self-awareness. It is helpful when we can read a good book, as I did with Allport’s, or meet someone who can help us work through undesirable biases and prejudices. So, the first step in helping people to manage their racial, national, and ethnic prejudices is to understand how they were likely developed and be prepared to take time to help people manage them.