Two histories of prejudice

In his classic historical study entitled ‘From “race psychology” to “studies in prejudice”’, Franz Samelson identified a dramatic thematic reversal in the way psychologists studied race. In the 1920s, ‘most psychologists believed in the existence of mental differences between races; by 1940, they were searching for the sources of “irrational prejudice”’. This same impulse to study prejudice spread throughout the liberal social sciences and intensified after the Second World War but the rhetorical and material context had changed considerably. Early conceptualizations of prejudice in psychology were designed to undermine the biological theories of categorical race differences that prevailed at the time and that underpinned legislative segregation and racial inequality of the Jim Crow system in the American South. After the racist genocide of the Holocaust and after the social and material transformations of the Civil Rights era in the United States, the kinds of ‘prejudice’ that remained as objects of psychological concern were fundamentally changed. Attention moved from crude and explicit forms of biological racism to subtle, modern, new, neo, symbolic, cultural and colour-blind racism. This chapter tells two histories of prejudice. The first is a history of how social psychologists have conceptualized prejudice as a property of mind, a psychological condition that results in distorted views and negative perceptions. This meta-theory has informed a series of attempts to look beyond the changing expressions of prejudice to theorize and measure the underlying psychological condition. This has been a quest to define and measure prejudice without history, outside the influence and reach of its social context.