A review of:
Janet K. SWIM & Charles STANGOR (eds.)
(1998). Prejudice: The Target's Perspective.
San Diego : Academic Press. Pp. xiv + 332. ISBN: 0-12-679130-9.
Janet Swim and Charles Stangor's thirty contributors to Prejudice are drawn largely from the north-east of the USA. To such psychologists, the pains of being a target of prejudice require no demonstration. Half a century of social environmentalism may be meeting its end in twin, adoption and chromosome studies which find little influence on people of their parents' social class or styles of child-rearing; and the USA may have provided a continuing practical demonstration of how minorities such as Asians, 'Latinos', Irish and Jews can climb Western society's greasy pole. Yet in America's intellectual heartland, prejudice is now considered an 'evil.' Jonathan Swift (1711) complained that "some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion." Such a criticism would be met with incredulity in US universities today; and the socially agreed wrongness of the 'evil' like that of paedophilia seems to the righteous to provide a guarantee that prejudice simply must cause actual harm. Though one chapter in Prejudice troubles to establish that thirty per cent of women roll their eyes in agony at hearing sexist jokes, and another chapter admits that race offers no empirical prediction of unfavourable life outcomes once socio-economic status is controlled, Swim & Stangor's authors generally just assume the sufferings of their targets of prejudice. Contributors to Prejudice thus display from the book's outset their own prejudice: that heroic efforts are needed if Black, female, homosexual and overweight people are to cope with the wicked ways of "Anglo and European Americans."
Initially, a certain interest attaches to the idea that 'targets' cope with prejudice by such psychological mechanisms as acting out, acting up, bridging, buffering, code switching, compensation, denial, devaluation, discounting, disengagement, identification, dis-identification, intensified group contact, negotiation, re-affirmation, re-mooring, social change, transcendence and the more alarmingly titled 'elimination.' (What about the scientific reaction of trying to find out whether one's group is indeed a little dull, neurotic, or 'icy'? Sadly, the authors do not credit 'victims' of prejudice with such open-minded curiosity.) As when one first reads a list of neo-Freudian 'defence mechanisms', it is fascinating to be told of the apparently limitless creativity of the human mind simply to re-invent reality in a less painful form. Can people truly cope with damaged self-images simply by believing, against the odds, that 'academic attainment doesn't matter' or that 'fat is beautiful'? Can authors who dream up such possible defences demonstrate that they are ever used?
Those two questions reduce to one. For to show that a claimed defence (e.g. a simple belief that IQ tests are biased) is indeed a defence (rather than just a reasonable, if incorrect hypothesis) requires evidence of some relief being gained from the original attack. Alas, on this key matter the present authors have simply nothing to offer. In pages that contain few figures and most of the r's are low-to-vanishing - the authors no more prove the efficacy or, for that matter, the counter-productivity of 'defences' than does the average clinical psychology text-book. Indeed, it emerges (pp. 115, 126) that a big problem for the authors is the above-average level of 'self-esteem' and general merriment found in people who are Black or overweight. Kretschmer and Sheldon and Witkin receive no mention in these pages; but the differential psychologist who knows these writers will be asking whether endomorphic people might not be just naturally agreeable, good-humoured and low in neuroticism or psychoticism despite being physically unattractive in a world that favours sexual athletes. According to the present authors' prejudices, fat Black female homosexuals should have an especially hard time in life; but no evidence is presented of such special pain, of unusually defensive stratagems by such women (compared to any control group), of higher criminal deviance by them, or of any relief being obtained as a consequence of the women's putative strategy use. Though a third of the book's contributors cite a paper by Crocker & Major (1989) which reported self-esteem to be normal or high in African and Hispanic Americans, Prejudices does not resolve the problem. Even a massive exercise in reassuring Black students at Michigan University that they did not owe their places merely to 'race preferencing' produced no gains felt to be worth quantifying. Psychological experts themselves plainly do not understand what are the helpful perspectives for 'targets' to adopt.
Of what, then, can such a book consist?
Quite literally, these afficionados of perspectives and
defences fill their pages with speculations. In several of the
chapters, about a fifth of the sentences are modal propositions.
According to the authors' perspectives - such as "Nigrescence
theory" certain horrors or defences or benefits from defences
'may', 'can', 'could' or 'should' occur. The senior editor opens
the very first chapter with "…encountering prejudice
and discrimination can be stressful." In the book's jargon,
the 'may' qualifier so "speaks to" the authors' perspectives
and shortage of findings that it is omnipresent. "Experience
of prejudice may take various forms, and occur across different
levels of social context", readers are advised; "stigmatized
people…may use compensatory strategies", begins one
chapter; "men and women may experience different types of
stressful experiences", announces another. One page, p. 258,
in the chapter by Nyla Branscombe and Naomi Ellemers, deserves
multiple photocopying for display on notice-boards in psychology
departments: on this page - discussing the (entirely undemonstrated)
long-term effects of discrimination - not a single sentence is
free of modal verbs. Hardened readers of modern social psychology
will recall the philosophical handiness of 'may' statements: it
is impossible to falsify them.
Just as bad, those definite
propositions which remain to Prejudice's contributors are
often banal: 'males are more often called sexist than are females';
'women attempt to avoid harassment by avoiding certain situations
with known and unknown men'; 'people have low self-esteem if not
accepted anywhere'; 'groups differ in status'; 'students who felt
they had benefited from affirmative action were more likely to
endorse the policy (r = .19, p<.005).' Frequently,
the most trivial propositions are buttressed by a string of references
to unread articles by the authors in unread journals. The statement
that people give up ("divest the self from") pursuits
in which they believe they have been unsuccessful requires the
supportive invocation of no less than fourteen names and seven
dates in academic publications (p. 87). This is hardly the higher
hermeneuticism - the incomprehensible and pretentious constructivism
which Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998) have so ably lampooned.
Rather, it is a low form of postmodernism for social psychologists.
The latter need something convenient and politically left-ish
to remark as a prelude to pseudo-study; and they find objects
of veneration in victims' subjective impressions and allegations
rather than in reality and causes. Then, to disguise these psychologists'
lack of substance or argument, readers are offered trivia.
If social psychology and sociology had been just at the beginning of their interest in 'symbolic interactionism', 'social perception', 'self images', 'the self as seen by others', 'personal constructs', 'labeling theory', 'identity theory' or 'the rhetoric of ideology', a book like this might have been given a cheery wave, if not an endorsement. Plainly, it would once have made a change to have the psychology of supposedly victimised minorities explored in pilot studies with N's of 10 - instead of poor old 'authoritarians' being ceaselessly indicted by psychologists for their repressed aggression or stupidity. Alas, it is now over thirty-five years since Erving Goffman wrote Stigma - a book frequently referenced by the present authors, though they offer no improvement on its content and exhibit a fearsome regression from its style.
It is easy to see why psychologists want
to study heroic 'coping' by the victims of red-blooded Anglo-European
males. Once there were social reformers who planned to help the
working class by testing IQs and ensuring that each child had
a suitable education. By and large, these London School objectives
were achieved and the working class vanished into home ownership
- even if there now exists a new underclass of victims of drink,
drugs and comprehensive schools. Swim & Stangor's contributors
would doubtless like to repeat the trick However, they have no
interesting, let alone well-evidenced analysis of how to help
the new 'minorities' who together make up a constituency for today's
left-sounding politicians; and they flirt with ethnic pride in
a way that the left classically eschewed. 'Identification' with
one's group is favoured in this book; but one of the highest reported
correlations is of +.35 between "African American racial
identification" and "hostility toward European Americans."
Can the authors really be so sanguine about talking up racial
'identification'? How will they feel when White youths, too, start
'identifying'?
In fact, some of the authors'
own studies reveal the routine importance to their 'victims' of
prosaic self-help. For example, fat people make a better impression
(on a partner) when they believe that they and their weight problems
can be seen (by video link). Compensation by fat people
sometimes 'works' on the non-fat, even if the success does nothing
to improve fat people's own already quite sunny personalities.
Likewise, people who have 'baby faces' overcome stereotyping and
are actually more likely to win military medals than are
the non-baby-faced. Yet the present authors are not generally
interested in helping victims of labelling to make the best of
reality. Rather, they want reality deconstructed and undone or
at least not discussed in public places.
Devoid of homo-, gyno-, raco-
and fato-phobic prejudice though they themselves may be, these
psychologists have forgotten the words of that keen progressive
of his day, William Hazlitt (1817): "There is no prejudice
so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all
prejudice." These authors' conclusions in advance of evidence
are pretty clear. Just as the keener socialists once advocated
punitive taxation of the rich, so these 'researchers' feel that
guilty White males should pay limitless Danegeld (via compensatory
education, counselling and job creation) to minorities and their
psychology-studying chorus. Sadly, Swim & Stangor's work stereotypes
'targets of prejudice' and delivers no findings of significance.
Faced with such social-psychologizing, Whitey will probably find
it easier to deal directly with the Nation of Islam.
REFERENCES
CROCKER, J. & MAJOR, B. (1989).
'Social stigma and self-esteem: the
self-protective properties
of stigma.' Psychological Review 96, 608-630.
HAZLITT, W. (1817). 'On the Tendency of
Sects.' In Jon Cook, Selected
Writings of William Hazlitt.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1991.
SOKAL, A. & BRICMONT, J. (1998). Intellectual
Impostors. London :
Profile.
SWIFT, J. (1711). 'Thoughts on Various Subjects.'
In Carl Van Doren,
The Portable Jonathan Swift.
London : Chatto & Windus, 1968.
CHRIS BRAND; August 1998.
This review was published in Personality
& Individual Differences 26, 1148-1150 (1999).
For Chris Brand, Psychologist, go to http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk. This homepage gives access to Brand's history, CV, battles for free speech with his 'de-publisher', John Wiley, and Edinburgh 'Looneyversity', and tutoring services for students.
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Last modified: 5 v 1999