Prejudice is a group-level status defense, not individual hostility

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. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Strong parallel to the ‘On Sacrifice’ reading on how elites stabilize stratified societies through ritual; and to Parker’s argument that prestige defense rather than hatred drives intergroup relations. — connects to: Group prejudice links to general personality traits rather than to psychiatric illness. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1833; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”
• DEFINE: Introduces Blumer’s ‘sense of group position’ concept, a forgotten alternative to Allport’s individual-level model.