This article analyzes the ways in which the object of prejudice—the Jew, the Negro, or any other chosen as victim—serves as the symbolic embodiment of certain psychological fears and hates which the prejudiced person is able to cope with only through the use of an external scapegoat. Arnold Rose is assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. He collaborated with Gunnar Myrdal in the writing of An American Dilemma (1944), the monumental study of the American Negro, and he has recently written an abridgement of this work, The Negro in America.
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Students of prejudice have usually analyzed it from the standpoint of the objective outsider: they note that prejudiced beliefs deviate sharply from fact, and they try—by pointing out fact—to bring belief closer to fact. They fail to realize that the typically prejudiced person is likely to be quite familiar with the objects of his prejudice—Negroes or Jews—the falsity of his prejudices being daily demonstrated by the plain evidence of his senses. As a matter of fact, he even knows that his beliefs are false: “some of my best friends are Jews,” he says, and he knows many “good Negroes.” Yet he will continue to say “All Jews are Communists,” or “Niggers can’t be trusted.”
Yet, however false as to fact, prejudice has a certain logic, a logic not of reason but of the emotions. Prejudice is not an eccentric whim or fancy; it has psychological roots which can be traced.
Prejudice is more than false belief; it is a structure of false beliefs with a purpose, however unconscious. In analyzing prejudice, it is important to discover the false beliefs, but it is more important to discover their purpose. Similarly, in fighting against prejudice, it is important to puncture the false beliefs factually, but it is more important to weaken the purpose. The false beliefs are the symptoms of prejudice, but the purpose is its root cause.
How do we find out the purpose of a prejudice? There are no infallible ways, but the social scientist has some good clues. In the first place, he reasons that a structure of false beliefs that lasts for hundreds of years, as in the case of anti-Negro prejudice, or for thousands of years, as in the case of anti-Semitism, must represent a substitute satisfaction for some great need which cannot be satisfied normally oi even openly expressed. The prejudices have what he terms a “symbolic signficance.” The symbolic significance of flat dresses and flat bobs for women during the 1920’s seems to have been that women felt a need to look like men, and yet did not wish to admit that need openly. This is a very simple example, but on a far more complex level we have warrant for believing that “Jews” and “Negroes” have similar symbolic significance for prejudiced persons.
It has become common to say that Jews and Negroes are hated and feared because they have become the “scapegoats” onto which aggressions against frustrating conditions can be displaced. For instance, many well-meaning people who have thought about the position of the Negro in the South have come to believe that the hatred of the Negro stems solely from the economic deprivations of the whites. Because the poor white is kept down—by the rich Southern plantation owner, by the rich Northern industrialist, or simply by the undeveloped physical environment—he is frustrated, and vents his aggressions against the Negro, feeling helpless to revolt against the dominant groups. Similarly, it is said that German Jews were made scapegoats for all the frustrations due to political instability, inflation, and the Versailles Treaty. There is much truth in this “scapegoat-displacement” or “frustration-aggression” theory. It does explain why a group with a common and major dissatisfaction with which it cannot come to grips feels a need to hate and fear a substitute symbol. But the scapegoat theory does not explain why one group and not another is always chosen to be the scapegoat. It does not explain why those who are not frustrated are frequently almost as prejudiced as those who are.
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The major charges against Jews are that they are sneaky, dishonest, selfish, domineering, too clever, too ambitious, clannish, vulgar, noisy, and inclined to radicalism. The major charges against Negroes are that they are unbridled, passionate, violent, immoral, animal-like, untrustworthy, and lazy. There are some peculiar inconsistencies in these popular assertions. For example, Negroes are believed to be lazy and unambitious, yet they are said to be seeking political domination over whites in the South. Evidence of individual Negroes becoming “intelligent,” proud, ambitious, self-confident, provokes the most violent reactions in the South. Jews are said to be clannish, yet they are also said to be always trying to push into circles where they are not wanted. Jews are held to be domineering, yet any evidence of Jews becoming servile or seeking sympathy stimulates only sadism on the part of those prejudiced against them.
Some of the distortions of fact are significantly peculiar. For example, a group of persons who had already volunteered the information that they objected to Jews because they had too much power, were asked what types of businesses they thought Jews dominated. They said that Jews dominated finance and politics. Few said that Jews dominated the movie and radio industries or the manufacture of clothing—which happen actually to be the only types of businesses in which Jews are disproportionately represented.
One of the most fascinating facts about statements of prejudice is the constant repetition of certain “reasons” in any and all contexts. When one argues with a prejudiced Southerner on the basis of fact and reason that no harm could come from letting Negroes use the regular restaurants and hotels, or suggests any measure, however mild, to reduce segregation and discrimination, he almost invariably ends up with the equivalent of “Would you like your daughter to marry a Negro?” These are the types of raw facts we pick up about prejudice. How can we interpret them? Looking at the stereotypes about Negroes, it is obvious that most of them picture the Negro as uninhibited, with special emphasis on the absence of sexual inhibitions. Then, we may ask from what premises do prejudiced whites draw the conclusion that their daughters would marry Negroes if they were to sit at the next table in a restaurant? Logically, we must infer that there is a repressed sexual attraction. When we check into Southern folklore we find that there are myths about Negro males having unusually large sexual organs, and tales about the greater passion and sexual adeptness of Negro females. Several of the stereotypes about Negroes—that they are uninhibited, rhythmic, passionate—further indicate their sexual attractiveness. We need not go into all the reasons which lead us to believe that the Negro is a symbol of free and passionate sex—which is desired by white Americans but still not felt to be proper in our society, with its codes of sexual expression.
The emotions which form the basis of prejudice are, on the one hand, hate and fear, and, on the other hand, envy and desire. Envy is created not only by the white male’s desire for the Negro female, but also by his belief that the white female would prefer the Negro male to him if she had equal access to both. Similarly, the white female must suppress her desires for the Negro male, and she envies the Negro female her superior attractiveness for the white male.
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In the United States, at least, there is little I association of Jews with sexual desirability. Rather, the Jews are associated with economic success, political radicalism, and quick adaptive-ness to a rapidly changing world. Historically such traits are connected with life in cities, and so are the Jews. The Jews are the urban people par excellence. In the Middle Ages they engaged in the then-despised commercial and financial occupations and were not allowed to live outside of cities. When capitalism grew and the cities expanded, the Jews had a head start, and became successful in terms of the new values despite the hurdles put in their way. Historical trends tranformed what was intended to be a punishment into a reward. Non-Jews came to be envious of that reward. Envy generated hate—and there was already the initial hate arising from the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as God.
It is worth noting how the popular image of the Jew is related to the city in many ways. (In much of America, “New York” and “Jew” are almost interchangeable epithets.) It is not simply that the Jew adapts to city life and makes a success of it. The Jew is willing to submit to the repression of the “free instincts” which is required by the city. The Jew is also thought of as rootless, as unattached to the “community” with its meaningful values. The Jew is mysterious; he might be the manipulator of all those forces which seem to control the life of the little man in the big city. 1
The Jews are hated today, I would suggest, primarily because they serve as a symbol of city life. Residents of cities as well as farm or village people can, and do, hate cities and what they stand for. 2 An overall correlation between hatred of city life and hatred of Jews has not yet been empirically established, but there is indirect evidence that further study would find one.
In the first place, there is among the masses of urban residents, from whom anti-Semitism gets its most violent expression in America, a nostalgia for country life and the rural virtues. Sometimes it takes the form of a desire for ease and for avoidance of hustle-and-bustle, but always it includes a wish for a simple, straightforward existence. The wealthy classes are not exempt from this, but are rather especially prone to it, perhaps in unconscious moral revulsion against the sharp and devious ways in which their own fortunes were often built up. The ideal picture of rural life is, of course, unrealistic, in terms of the actual life of an average farmer—an unrealism buttressed by the experiences of the city dwellers who can afford to take vacations in the country. Nevertheless, city dwellers are so taken in by their picture of country life, and the supposed virtues of honesty, clear-thinking, and altruism which that life is supposed to engender, that this may be a factor in their acquiescence in the political dominance of farm blocs and “downstate” or “upstate” political machines, as well as the special legislation that exists for the farmer: artificial support of high prices for his product, guarantee of a minimum income without the need for proving indigency, special exemption from the draft law.
The glorification of rural life has real historical roots, of course. The early history of our country took place largely in a rural setting, and many of the great heroes of America, as well as of other countries, had a rural origin. Children in schools are drilled in the glories and virtues of rural life until it becomes the nearest thing to heaven on earth. The rural people, on the other hand, are schooled in distrust of the city, and they can never quite understand its economic basis, or the competitive, disinterested character of its relations with them.
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It is not without significance that the city man’s picture of country life excludes the Jew. He knows that Jews are not farmers, and every evidence that Jews ever have been or might become farmers is greeted with astonishment. Urban non-Jews who do not object to residential proximity to Jews in the city, are yet likely to protest vehemently against the presence of Jews in or near their summer resorts. Jews remind them of the city, whose ways they try to forget when they take their mental and moral, as well as physical, vacation.
Thus, perhaps, the host of contradictory antipathies toward the Jews can be explained by the association of these antipathies with another one—an antipathy toward city life. Jews are called sharp business men (capitalists) and are hated for that; Jews are called Communists and are hated for that. Both capitalism and Communism are urban products, which are hated because they are too complex to be understood by the little people and because they “make trouble” for them. Yet there is no point in hating such impersonal phenomena as capitalism and Communism; it is much easier to hate their symbols—the Jews.
Jews are blamed for being successful and for being low class. But it is only by rural standards that they are successful—all city people are successful when they have to work only eight hours a day and can have so many of their household duties taken care of by other people. It is also by rural standards of an older day that Jews are low class. Farmers today may be just as dirty, just as concerned with striking a good bargain, and just as noisy (when they have a chance to talk) as lower-class city people, but gentlemen farmers or rural Puritans of an earlier day may not have been—at least in myth.
Jews have been blamed at the same time for being both narrow-minded and so cosmopolitan as to put their general human loyalties above their national loyalties. These are urban traits. The typical city dweller lives such a compartmentalized existence and is forced to avoid so large a portion of the stimuli that bear down on him from all sides that he must be narrow in terms of the possibilities of his world. Yet the city-dweller is often also forced to become aware of the wider currents of opinion and of problems outside his province or nation.
Similarly, the Jew is blamed for being at the same time cliquish and “pushy.” The urbanite must make a selection of those to whom he chooses to respond among all the thousands with whom he comes in contact every day. The urbanite does, however, want to get ahead, and to cultivate those acquaintances that he believes will be enjoyable or profitable. The rural person, on the other hand, has a limited number of human contacts, and it is taken for granted that he will be “pushy”—that is, make friends with all he meets and learn as much about his acquaintances as he can.
The Jew is feared because he is believed to be superhumanly wise, and yet viewed with contempt because he is thought to be weak and “unhandy.” The “city slicker” stereotype has merely been extended in the first instance, out of the truth that a wide range of social contacts sharpens the wits. On the other hand, the helplessness of the city man in the face of any breakdown of the complicated services that usually support him is notorious. He does not have the knowledge or the tools to improvise in his physical environment, and when the web of interdependence he assumes is broken, he is helpless. This extends into his social, intellectual, and emotional life as well.
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For understandable reasons, many urban and rural persons hate the characteristics of city life—the impersonality, the sharpness, the weakness, the cosmopolitanness, the narrow-mindedness, the pushiness, the cliquishness, the “capitalism” and the “Communism” which it creates. Yet these haters retain at least an unconscious recognition that the city is also necessary and good. They know that the many desirable products of modern life presuppose cities, and that much of what we are so proud of in “modern civilization” is a consequence of cities. They admire cities, at the same time as they fear and hate them. They hate cities because they cannot adjust to them, or—as in the case of the successful—because they feel that they have been immoral in adjusting to them. But just as they unconsciously admire the city, so they envy the Jews.
The symbolic projection of hatred of the city onto the Jews allows the prejudiced person to destroy the city and to escape the city, and at the same time to keep it and live in it. Prejudice, we have said, is a way of finding relief from a mental conflict about something; a particular group becomes identified as a symbol of that thing, so that the group can be hated and the thing itself left untouched. Of course, the conflict must be deep and important to the minds of the prejudiced persons, and the symbolic group must be associated over a long period of time with the thing in question—sex and cities, in our analysis—about which there is mental conflict. The conflict must be felt by most of the members of the society, and the symbolic association must occur for practically all of them before there can be prejudice.
Further evidence of the basis of prejudice in the symbolic substitution of a group of people for a thing which is both feared and admired, hated and loved, emerges when people who were once critical of uninhibited sex and of city life, or who come out of a background of such criticism, have a radical conversion in their favor. Those who rebel against the straight-lacedness of their childhood into bohemianism are the ones who go into ecstacies over all things Negro—they love the Negro because he is so uninhibited, so natural, so “African.” They are not concerned with the rights of the Negro per se, nor with his participation in a common humanity. They would put the Negro on a pedestal to love and admire—still a symbol of sex, now freed from puritanical restrictions. They have become converted, from both sex restrictions and anti-Negro feelings, but their symbolic identification of the two remains.
Similarly—although not nearly so often in American society—one can see that persons who radically break off from the anti-urban attitudes of their youthful environment and become enamoured of city life, who become Communist, or completely sophisticated, often can’t de enough for Jews, for Jews as Jews. For these people, Jews are still the symbol of the city, or Communism, or of the pursuit of expensive pleasure they are now embracing.
The symbolic interpretation of prejudice allows for an explanation of group self-hatred. It is natural for a group of people who must participate in a culture to absorb aspects of that culture even when the latter work to the detriment of the group. Thus, Jews too hate the city; some of them fear it because they have not been able to make a satisfactory adjustment to its complexities. Unconsciously accepting the identification of Jews with the city, they hate the Jews and are ashamed of any manifestation of Jewishness (urbanness) in their own family. Though Negroes are perhaps less susceptible to this group self-hatred today, the severe criticisms by middle-class Negroes of the sex freedom displayed by lower-class Negroes offer an obvious example.
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What suggestions for the treatment of prejudices come out of this diagnosis? Since symbolic identification is only one of the requirements of prejudice, its disappearance could not eliminate prejudice completely. The neurotic whose compulsive behavior is a symbolic manifestation of a repressed childhood desire or fear, may not be able to rid himself of this behavior even when the symbolic significance of his neurosis is made clear to him and he accepts it.
But understanding might help to dispel prejudice. Obviously, among the major psychological needs of the prejudiced person would be his realization of the conflict in his motives and values. He would need to be shown that he both wants more pleasure in sex and that he thinks that sexual pleasure is reprehensible. The puritanical “ideal” of the South would need to be weakened, and the myth of the sexual superiority of Negroes dispelled. If the preoccupation of the South with the Negro in general, and with the sexual habits of Negroes in particular, were eliminated, prejudice would be reduced. The Southerner needs first to be taught not to envy Negroes before he can learn not to hate and fear them. An open admiration, if it has a reasonable basis, is mentally healthy, but a secret, ungrounded envy—especially when it deals with so fundamental a general human desire as sex—is not.
Similarly in the case of the anti-Semite, the conflict of desires must be resolved before prejudice can be reduced. He needs to be shown that he likes and needs cities, and yet that he hates and fears them. He needs to learn to accept cities as a necessary part of modern civilization, and he needs to learn how to adjust to cities or to join movements for the elimination of their undesirable features. The Jews and the city should be disassociated in his mind—possibly by public emphasis on every effort of the Jew to regain a position on the land. Movies on the Palestinian settlements might be a soul-stirring revelation to anti-Semites well-intentioned enough not to dismiss it immediately as propaganda.
Of course, one must not exaggerate the effect of such measures. After all, a large part of anti-Semitism is based on envy of the Jew, and envy is not to be reduced by making the envied object—successful urban adjustment, that is—less enviable, but by making it more attainable.
This relates to the “frustration—aggression” theory. Frustration may be conceived of as supplying the energy, the motive force, for prejudice: symbolic association directs it against certain suitable groups. It would be naive to suggest that frustration can be reduced or symbolic associations dissolved simply by the presentation to consciousness of the real sources of frustration and the real meaning of the symbolic association. Both are products of long and complex historical developments, both require long and complex developments to eliminate them: just as getting over a neurosis may be as long and painful a process as acquiring it. Nevertheless, the attack on prejudice, like the analysis of it, must work on the basis of the desire of all sane men to be rational—albeit rational in their own peculiar way rather than in the view of the impartial observer.
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1 The symbolic identification of Jews with city life may be a strictly modern phenomenon. In a recent study, Joshua Trachtenberg has carefully accumulated evidence which indicates that in the Middle Ages Jews were symbolically identified with the devil. As long as the Jews rejected God—that is, Jesus—they could only be considered as partisans of the devil, in the minds of the medieval Christians. If they accepted God—that is, became Christians—they were no longer the objects of prejudice. This fact alone would indicate that anti-Semitism has changed its character in modem times. A Jew cannot avoid prejudice today by becoming a Christian: he is still regarded as a Jew.
2 See “Why Americans are Insecure,” by Arnold Green (COMMENTARY, July 1948), for an extensive sociological analysis of the impact of urbanization on the native American population.
