Modern anti-prejudice norms only drive prejudice underground, not reduce it

Evidence

According to Allport, none of the above strategies provides a true or effective resolution of inner conflict. Instead, each of these strategies and their contemporary theoretical counterparts explain how the conflict between thought and action remains intact and nonthreatening. Hence, they are explanations for how prejudice persists rather than how prejudice is reduced. Each of the modern theories, for example, presumes that in the context of normative pressure, people’s prejudices are forced “underground,” such that they are expressed in subtle, indirect, or covert ways. Thus, prejudice does not truly decline; rather, the form in which prejudice is expressed is changed. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2099

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my notes on moral licensing and aversive racism; also to the modern-symbolic racism literature in prior chapters. — connects to: Anti-Semites merely voice a society whose official norms legitimize prejudice — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1791
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that norm-driven ‘declines’ in prejudice are only form-changes, not reductions, is a genuinely paradigm-shifting lens for evaluating all correlational self-report evidence.