The Sexual Basis of Social Prejudice

No subject has been more thoroughly analyzed, discussed and debated than social prejudice. However, it is surprising that so much of the theorizing has been based on everything except evidence from everyday life and clinical work. We are told of herd instinct, scape goat mechanisms, economic forces, mass psychosis, mass inferiority feelings and ignorance. Yet none of these ideas are fully correlated with what we see clinically and in the psychopathology of everyday life. Talk of mass psychosis or herd instinct as we will, if we are to gain real understanding, we must ultimately go back to the individual, his drives, fears and attempts at adaptation.

Of late, much has been written about prejudice against individual groups, mainly of minority groups. Anti-Semitism has been singled out for exhaustive study. Yet the problem is neither singular or restricted. There is no logic in seeking the cause of anti-Semitism unless we also study anti-Gentilism, anti-Negroism, anti-Catholicism, anti-labor and anti-capitalism or anti-Colgate University (a great prejudice in Syracuse).

Zilboorg (4) states: “Social prejudice, however, does not mean being prejudiced in favor of something or someone; it always means being against something or someone. Even the prejudice in favor of one's college or fraternity or club is only a manner officially of covering up one's ‘being against’ something or someone. Belonging to an ‘exclusive’ group does not mean self-restriction at all; exclusiveness means social exclusion of others from a self-appointed inner circle; it means organized embattlement against others. The one who is a member of an ‘exclusive’ class or club or fraternity does not isolate himself from others; he may go into the outside world, mix with whomever he wants, even enjoy going ‘slumming’ as it were. But he and his colleagues stand constant guard against the intrusion of others; his dislike of the outside must never be permitted to diminish and his aggression against any intrusion