Prejudice is a cultural mechanism protecting dominant groups’ privileges

Evidence

In 1958, Blumer sketched out a tentatively political argument about prejudice – that it was driven by dominant groups’ feelings of threat and sustained by powerful, group-level cultural depictions of subordinates that were designed to protect the dominant group’s “sense of group position” (p. 3). Blumer still emphasized hostility as an intrinsic element of prejudice and the importance of stereotypes in feeding that hostility (albeit at the societal/cultural level rather than at the individual level), and he fell short of an unambiguous political argument (see Jackman, 1994), but he vehemently made the case that prejudice was not the product of individual hostility but a cultural, group-level phenomenon designed to protect the dominant group’s claims to privileged status. His argument was out of step with the Allport paradigm. It was a sleeper. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Blumer’s group-position thesis anticipates social dominance and system-justification theories; relevant to the vault’s prejudice-psychology reassessment thread. — connects to: When two human groups compete, the advantaged one maintains dominance through oppression — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 151; Cultural violence arises from superiority beliefs fused with underlying group vulnerability — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 96; The prom ritual regulates heteronormativity and white class privilege. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 830 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: How does Blumer’s ‘sense of group position’ framework square with contact theory’s prejudice-reduction through equal-status contact?
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 653