All 13 Uses of
prejudice
in
Black Like Me
- I knew that he had no prejudices, but I nevertheless did not want to involve him in any way, since reprisals might be taken against him by bigots or by his associates, who might resent his role as my host once my story became known.†
- I read through the night the story of a native-born Southerner, a man who had tried to follow the crowd, who ran an innocuous little newspaper, The Petal Paper, glad-handed, joined the local civic clubs and kept himself in line with "popular opinion," which meant "popular prejudice," or "keep the nigger in his place," in a Christian and 100 percent American fairplay manner, of course.†
- In a country of free speech and press, they starved him out for expressing views not in harmony with their prejudices.†
- His case, along with those of other "Southern traitors," like Hodding Carter, Easton King, Ralph McGill and Mark Ethridge, illustrates the "true Southerner's" admirable lack of race prejudice: he is as willing to destroy whites who question his "wisdom" as he is to destroy Negroes, I put the manuscript away and tried to sleep.†
- The two great arguments— the Negro's lack of sexual morality and his intellectual incapacity—are smoke screens to justify prejudice and unethical behavior.†
- Let's us go get just roaring blinko drunk and forget all this damned prejudice stuff.†
- Paternalistic—we show our prejudice in our paternalism—we downgrade their dignity.†
- They sought to make themselves conform ever more perfectly to God's will, whereas outside I had seen mostly men who sought to make God's will conform to their wretched prejudices.†
- I told him how often I had heard them invoke God, and then some passage from the Bible, and urge all who might be faltering in their racial prejudice to "Pray, brother, with all your heart before you decide to let them niggers into our schools and cafes."†
- Then I realized that he was describing racists everywhere and from all times—that this is the religious trait of men who twist their minds to consider racial prejudice a virtue—whether it be a White Citizens Council or Klan member, a Nazi gauleiter, a South African white supremacist or merely someone's aunt who says, "Nobody's worse than those Italians (or Spaniards, or Englishmen, or Danes, etc.)."†
- They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices.†
- And in the midst of it, the picture of the prejudice and bigotry from which I had just come flashed into my mind,
*prejudice = unreasonable and unfair belief or feeling
- We were not, of course, because even well-disposed white men tended to be turned off and affronted if black men told them truths that offended their prejudices.†
Definition:
-
(prejudice) bias that prevents objective consideration -- especially an unreasonable belief that is unfair to members of a race, religion, or other group