Prejudice is a group-level defense of privilege, not individual animosity.

Evidence

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. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 653

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Blumer’s sleeper argument reframes the entire locus of prejudice from individual psychology to structural power-maintenance — a paradigm shift Allport’s hostility model obscured for decades.