Prejudice, Racism, and Tribalism: A Primer for White People

By Anthony M. D'Agostino MD

This is a thoughtful, frank, and compassionate foray into understanding race and racism in America today. Dr D’Agostino approaches these topics with honesty and wit using research and his own experiences as foundation. Racism, he points out, is profitable. So is fear. Part memoir, part historical survey, he walks the reader through how racism, bias, and tribalism are part of the human experience.

The book is for White Americans seeking to understand today’s political and racial divides. His grasp of global history and the actions of all human civilizations from antiquity onward is impressive. He begins with the complexities of finding workable definitions, then explores the historical underpinnings of slavery, colonialism, and xenophobia globally and in the US. Within each chapter he addresses the current moment, particularly how the ideals of liberty and freedom have been perverted to manipulate the fears of White Americans.

This book is not an academic study. And there is plenty that the hypersensitive, politically-correct reader will take issue with. If so, that is to their detriment, because this book is a primer for how to do the hard work of examining what it means to be a White American. Not for the sake of feeling guilt or shame over the past, but it’s important to understand how we got to the present so we can avoid being complicit. He invites the reader in by continually asking questions, not in a finger-wagging, preachy way, but as a model for introspection. Throughout the book, he asks himself: What would I have done differently? Many of us like to think we’d have been ardent abolitionists, or righteously denied our privilege, but would we?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886546477

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Prejudice, Racism, and Tribalism

A Primer for White People

Anthony M. Dand#39;Agostino, MD

Copyright © 2023 Anthony M. D’Agostino, MD

All rights reserved

Second Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88654-645-3 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-647-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

To Beverly

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prejudice

Racism

Tribalism

Prejudice and Biology

White People

Culture

Are White People Better Than Other People?

How I Became a Republican

Prejudices about Native Americans

Mexicans and Central Americans

Prejudice, Statistics, and Imperialism

Personal Influences

Prejudice and Muslim Immigration

Religion, Prejudice, and the Concept of Original Sin

Prejudice and Liberty

Colin Kaepernick and the Meaning of Patriotism

Prejudice and the LGBTQ

Prejudices about Women

Prejudices about Asians

Prejudice, Politics, and Free Market Health Care

Make America White Again

The White Man's Dilemma

Epilogue

Bibliography

About the Author

To Beverly

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John Kallal, PhD; Greg Teas, MD; Jim Jordan, MD; Mary Ellen Jordan, PhD; and my wife, Beverly, for reading and commenting and making corrections and suggestions on the final form of the manuscript.

Introduction

One hears often these days of the sorry state of race relations in America and that we need to engage one another in a conversation about race. Those who make these statements do it in such a way as to imply that the listener knows what they mean. The implication here is that race relations are bad and said recommended conversation will somehow help make it better. But do we actually want better race relations, or is there benefit in racial and ethnic polarization? Are these conversations already being conducted in books and magazine articles, in classrooms and in corporate seminars, on the internet and on TV talk shows? Are these helping? I used to think that they did, but lately I've begun to think otherwise. North Dakota, Virginia, Texas, and some other states are now enacting laws forbidding discussions about race in schools. If state legislatures can ban discussions about historical events in schools, where will we have these conversations?

The internet is a prime facilitator of the most radical voices supporting acrimony and division. Since more Americans, I'm told, get their news today from Facebook than traditional news sources and Facebook takes no responsibility for the accuracy of whatever appears on its platform, reality becomes whatever one wants it to be. Moreover, Facebook doesn't just eschew journalistic responsibility for the news on its platform (they see themselves as a kind of community bulletin board); its algorithms actually facilitate misinformation and prejudicial thinking by specifically directing participants to sites that reinforce whatever it is that you like. If you like items that suggest Blacks are not quite human or the moon is made of green cheese or that vaccinations make you sterile, guess where you get directed?

What is White privilege, and is it the offspring of institutional and systemic racism? What is institutional and systemic racism? If Whites can somehow be convinced to give up White privilege—or have it forcibly wrested from us—would the problem somehow move closer to resolution? As a White person, how would I go about divesting myself of my White privilege? If I have such a thing, why would I want to give it up if by simply being White, I get to go home with all the privileges? That would seem like an unnatural behavior for any normal human being. Is there precedent for this sort of thing? Am I—consciously or unconsciously—misinterpreting the meaning of the term because I'm White?

And where do Brown people fit into this discussion? Who are the Brown people, and how shall we understand their problem? Why should we want to understand their problem? Are Chinese or Japanese people Brown? As I see the present conversation, a Brown person is anyone on the planet who is neither black-skinned of African origin nor white-skinned of European origin. Brown includes many people who have very different racial characteristics. These groups are now lumped into a single group who refer to themselves as Brown or of Color, which has become a synonym for someone who isn't White. Why don't we just describe them as non-White people? After all, isn't that the issue?

Commonly used words in this conversation are racism and racist. Who are the racists, and what does it mean to be a racist? To some extent, it has some of the cultural force of the N-word, although we can say or spell it out, which is not the case with the N-word, which only Black people are allowed to say or spell out. Why is that? Technically, anyone can be a racist, but in practice (in America), only White people can be racists based on a power definition of racism I will actually be recommending.

Are all White people racist? By its most inclusive definition, anyone of any race who hates or dislikes or has any kind of hesitation toward most or all the members of any other race could be eligible for the title of racist. By this overly broad definition, there are lots of racists in the world, including many people of Color. That's why, for this monograph, I'm going to suggest a much narrower definition. In America, I believe there is merit in a narrower definition of racism.

Do racists know that they're racists? My guess would be not usually, and I do believe the majority of White citizens strongly object to the label. In elementary schools, a new form of bullying involves calling the victim a racist and then attacking them on that pretext.

Writer Robin DiAngelo calls this inability of White people to talk about race without getting defensive: White fragility (chapter 2). They see the word as pejorative and, like the N-word, that it puts the recipient in a box with a long list of other very negative characteristics and qualities that the person may not possess. If someone called you a racist, would you take that as a neutrally descriptive term? Maybe we should call it the R-word. In labeling someone with the R-word, can we actually expect the recipient of that label to somehow behave differently or to somehow give up their racist-like ways? I wouldn't think so.

Am I a racist? That would depend on the definition. Do I harbor prejudices about Black people? Most likely. Is having prejudices the same as being racist? I don't think so, but if we deem the two words to be synonyms to each other, then I know of no one of any color, including myself, who is entirely free of racism. In psychiatric treatment (did I say I'm a psychiatrist?), when trying to understand a person's motivations and emotionally important belief systems, the psychoanalytic term overdetermined is sometimes invoked. This simply means, not surprisingly, that complex human beliefs, motivations, and behaviors are most likely determined by multiple influences. We just choose to deal with one at a time.

The subject of this monograph are the prejudices of White people. Including myself. Do I see myself as representative of elderly White American males as a group? I think I am, although when looking for the typical in any demographic, we're often looking at things like voting or buying patterns. Older White males are more likely to vote conservatively and less likely to actually buy things like skateboards or very tiny cars. We're unlikely to enthusiastically take up windsurfing or snowboarding. When it comes to issues of prejudice and racism, I see a wide variety of opinions in people my age. I'm not sure I see a typical elderly White male, at least not among the people I come into contact with. However, if 53 percent of elderly males voted Republican, it gets reported as elderly men vote Republican. That statement neglects the fact that 47 percent of that demographic—a very large number—did not. Because, in elections, we only care about who won, and compromise is now referred to as sellout or disloyalty. Polarization is now the norm.

Although a psychiatrist, I'm not a prejudice or racism scholar. I don't personally know anyone who is, but I'm sure they exist on college campuses somewhere. I know there are countless books and articles on the subject. I've used a few as bibliography. I have not personally spent years researching and writing about these issues. I do not have time to do that now. This writing is, therefore, necessarily biased while, at the same time, trying to be as objective as an old White person can be. The hope in the past was that, with universal education, citizens could make decisions based on facts and evidence. If that is the case, why do we elect so many narcissistic psychopaths?

The conversation about race phrase in my lifetime has referred almost exclusively to the Black-White racial divide. In recent years, it's become appropriate to include other of Color groups. There are Muslims in this world who are White, Black, and Brown. If I dislike them all, is my dislike of the Black and Brown ones racism and my dislike of the White ones something else? Does my dislike of someone because of their race differ qualitatively from my dislike of them based on some other quality? Is racism based on context?

We hear frequently used terms such as institutional and systemic racism. And what is structural racism? Are these aspects of racism that are embedded in the law and culture in such a way that White people, like myself, may simply not be aware of or ever think about? If our psyches are molded by institutional and systemic racism, how do we go about changing that of which we are not fully aware? Why would I want to if, by changing, I give up some degree of competitive advantage in life that I feel I worked for and have earned? I certainly am not at the top of the socioeconomic power structure, but I don't want to lose what I have achieved. Even most 1 percenters (the top 1 percent in terms of income) aren't inclined to give away advantages to the middle class like myself without a fight.

Problem: Is racist a word whose clarity is anything like the word pregnant? One can say with some conviction that one is pregnant or one is not. But can it be said that one is or is not a racist? In the medical profession, we speak of a pregnancy at one-week gestational age, where a woman shows no visible anatomic or physical changes and where the only way to detect it is by a very sensitive blood test—or a thirty-eight-week pregnancy, at which time the diagnosis can be made by virtually anyone. Can one be a little racist (one week) or a raging racist (thirty-eight weeks)? Who makes these determinations?

As with drug concentrations in the urine or blood, is there a scale with a cutoff value that we can use to say that those above a certain level are racists and those below are not? If we could do that, could we put such a test to any practical use? I wouldn't think so. How do we identify who is White, Black, or Brown? Do shades of skin color actually help us define racial categories? If all White people are ipso facto racists, shall we include that in our definition of White people? If we define all White people as racists, what problem does that solve?

Is the term racism—and racist—overused? I expect that would depend on how we choose to define it. Defined very broadly, it now means any negative feelings, opinions, or emotions triggered by racial differences between people. If we use that definition, we run into tribal prejudices, after which almost everyone is going to be racist to one degree or another, making meaningful conversations difficult. Which is why I will attempt to define what that word means for purposes of discussion and how it differs from the words prejudice and tribalism or even bigotry.

To my way of thinking, African Americans have been unequivocal victims of racism in America, whether we choose to append the words institutional, systemic, or structural. Most other ethnic minorities really have not—at least not to nearly the same degree or persistence. A news item recently aired about racism against Asians because a recent US president referred to COVID-19 as the China virus, and a few of his supporters have insulted and physically assaulted some East Asians as if they were somehow the cause of COVID-19. Racism? I don't think so. Bigotry or tribal prejudice might be better used here. Is there a difference between the terms racism and bigotry? I think so. Is this just some tricky semantic legerdemain on my part in terms of how we choose to define a word? Maybe. But the degree to which African Americans and White Americans have been affected is extraordinary compared to other populations.

Jews were obviously victims of what I'm referring to as institutional racism in Germany during the Nazi era, but there were other prejudices, mostly of a cultural/religious nature, in existence for centuries before Hitler made it into a racial issue. Nazis promoted the bizarre notion that the genetic makeup of Jews was somehow distinct from that of Aryan Germans and that Jews were genetically programmed to be treacherous and evil. Such characteristics were alleged to be hardwired into Jews such that no degree of education or training could undo those qualities, and for that reason, they had to be prohibited from contact with or interbreeding with Aryans. Fascists like to make up stuff as they go along since truth is optional in a fascist worldview.

Being Black in America has always been analogous to being a Jew in Nazi Germany. Some of the so-called scientific underpinnings of Nazi genetic theory came from, as we shall see, American researchers. Nazis thought Americans to be at the scientific forefront when it came to eugenics, the science of selective human breeding. Americans were actually saying what Nazis wanted to believe and for basically the same reasons. American interest in eugenics arose out of fear of immigrants and an ongoing need to justify segregation. Are Jews victims of racism in America today? I don't think so. Do some Americans hate Jews? Obviously!

Germany after 1933 allowed expression of only one political view in film, radio, and print media, and truth became whatever Hitler said it was. In America today, for many, truth has become whatever one former president says it is. No evidence required. Imagine, in America, only being allowed to see Fox News or Newsmax on TV and Breitbart in print. Public opinion is clearly malleable with that degree of control. In Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, truth, to a Russian, is whatever Vladimir Putin says it is. Everyone else gets arrested for fake news. Since childhood in humans is at least seventeen years, how can anyone escape childhood and become an adult without strongly formed prejudices. Most children—and adults—want to believe what those they love tell them.

An overly broad definition of racism is counterproductive in several different ways. First, it dilutes the meaning and historical impact of racial prejudice in America and how it has affected Black and White Americans currently and historically. If everyone is a victim of racism, loosely defined, then the impact on Black people can be trivialized. Like air pollution: Yes, it's a bad thing, but don't we all suffer equally in one way or another? Am I not also a victim? I don't complain about it, so why do you? Second, the term racist has come to have special meaning, like the N-word. Racist is a synonym for an evil person. When it is broadly defined, not all the people we refer to with that word are evil.

The N-word's historical meaning and usage has such powerful social impact that I evidently feel constrained about using it in this sentence. Writing or speaking, at least academically, I can use the words spic, mic, slant, kike, chink, Polack, dago, wop, redskin, guinea, Tonto, honky, or cracker. What's so special about the N-word? Even the word Oriental, which I have always regarded as politically neutral, has somehow become politically offensive. The University of Chicago has an Oriental Institute and there are many Oriental art shops, but somehow, it's become another bad word. But I'm still allowed to spell it out and pronounce it. People to whom these words are directed may have their feelings hurt or become angry—and I'm not arguing for more incivility—but that's about it. And while all these words represent attempts to insult or subjugate the targeted ethnic group, to use the term racism for these relatively petty insults, when compared to people living as slaves for more than 240 years and living under Jim Crow-like segregated conditions for another 150 years, doesn't seem appropriate. It would also thin out that long line of persons complaining of being victims of racism (including many White people) because someone referred to them using an unkind word. Yes, they may have been victims of prejudice, tribalism, bad manners, or possibly just stupidity, but it's not racism as I believe we should be using that word in this country at this time in history.

*****

I am a White male born in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1940s. Of course, that is not all that I am. Do I think of myself as a typical elderly White male person? I think I am, but there are so many White people in America born in so many different places who think so many different things—how could I say I'm typical of even a White person born in Chicago in the forties who happened to become a psychiatrist? There were, actually, more than you might think.

There are other aspects of me. Both sets of grandparents were born in Italy in the nineteenth century, and both of my parents and all my twelve aunts and uncles were born in Chicago before World War II, my father and one aunt actually before World War I. I went to Catholic schools first grade through undergrad. So how does this speak for or against whether I can be a typical American White person? I personally don't think it says much for or against it.

How do I vote? In voting, I probably do begin to resemble more closely a typical White American male over fifty. At the presidential level, I believe I've only voted for three Democrats in my lifetime, before Hillary Clinton became the fourth and Joe Biden the fifth. I was not old enough to vote in 1960 (one had to be twenty-one then) but would probably have voted for John Kennedy for no better reason than he was Catholic and under attack for his Catholicism—and because there had never been a Catholic president. After all, I belonged to the tribe of American Catholics, and I found it difficult to like Richard Nixon. Also, I was probably more liberal in my youth, but in truth, I didn't spend much time or energy thinking about political differences. In Illinois state elections, I have almost always voted Republican (in chapter 8 I say why). I was born and raised in Chicago and grew up equating almost all political corruption over the years as a Democratic concession in Illinois, or at least in Cook County. I wasn't so much a Republican as I was an anti-Democrat in a world where all politics is local.

I have no doubt overreacted, but I never saw myself as a critical thinker when it came to politics (probably making me more typical than not), and that didn't bother me until more recently. My parents and relatives have mostly voted Democratic over the years, although my mother became a Fox News / Sean Hannity addict in her dotage and a conspiracy theorist as her aging brain shrank (as all brains will eventually if one lives long enough). As cultural issues have overtaken economic ones as most important in politics, other relatives have moved to the right. The 2016 election of Donald Trump was an interesting and rather-obvious exploitation of cultural/tribal prejudices, and I'm still trying to understand it. The popular acceptance of many of his views of humanity may well have motivated me to actually attempt the task of re-examining my own.

I do not see this monograph as a free association about whether or not I'm a racist. Depending on how that term is defined, I may or I may not be. The issue is how I live with the consequences of my prejudices, how they influence my life, and how they affect others. But make no mistake: politically, most people position themselves to gain some advantage and attempt to disadvantage those they see as competitors. If I am a racist, it's because I see tangible benefit in it for me. If there was profit in racial equality, there would be more interest in the subject. Right now, there's more opportunity, and more profit, in racial inequality. There is no money in trying to sell racial equality to people. There is no political advantage in trying to sell equality to people. There is both financial and political gain in maintaining inequality, and racial inequality sells best.

I've been a psychiatrist for many years, so I do feel I'm an expert in this particular and rather-narrow branch of medicine. However, that does not make me an expert in political theory, most areas of psychology, sociology, American history, world history, tribalism, racism, molecular biology, genetics, or human evolution. Few people are. In spite of that, we are called upon to form opinions, most importantly act and vote on those opinions, and our actions, thoughts, and prejudices are guided by them. Therefore, what follows cannot claim to be some erudite treatise on prejudice or racism, which I am clearly not qualified to attempt. It is a highly subjective and inevitably prejudiced attempt to initiate my version of a conversation about prejudice, race, and tribalism, not with people of Color, but with White people like myself, which is where I believe the conversation needs to be directed. I cannot conceive of how to do it differently.

Chapter 1

Prejudice

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 1967 edition, and the Webster's New International Dictionary, 1976 edition, give these definitions:

Prejudice: 1) an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason. 2) any preconceived opinion or feeling, favorable or unfavorable. 3) unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, especially of a hostile nature, directed against a racial, religious, or national group.

Racism: 1) a doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievements, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others. 2) a policy of enforcing such asserted right. 3) a system of government and society based upon it.

Tribalism: Possessing a sense of identification with and loyalty to the habits, traits, and values characteristic of a close-knit familistic, sociocultural, occupational, or political group or in ceremonial or ritualistic activity.

Bigotry: 1) stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own. 2) actions, beliefs, prejudices, etc. of a bigot.

These definitions are similar but are not synonyms for one another. A premise of this book is that the differences are worth paying attention to. Racism, as defined, is different from prejudice and tribalism. As defined, racism is 1) a doctrine, 2) a policy, and 3) a system of government. Prejudice is an opinion or feeling. Tribalism is a sense of identification. Bigotry is a feeling of intolerance. Racism is tangible and objective, while the other words, more subjective.

*****

Some years ago, during one of my many consultations at child/adolescent residential treatment centers in the Chicago area, a seven-year-old African American child that I was about to interview looked at me sternly and blurted out, Are you prejudiced?

I was caught off guard for a moment since I realized the question was rather complex. Multiple competing thoughts went through my mind in those seconds. I assumed the issue had to do with the obvious fact that he was Black and I was White. I also appreciated the fact that he was saying what an older, more discreet child would've only thought but not said in that situation. Oddly enough, it was the only time in a career of more than fifty years that anyone had ever posed what would seem to be a rather-obvious question. He was being straightforward and, I felt, deserved a straightforward answer. But what was the answer? Did I harbor prejudices about his being Black (or a ward of the state or both)? Of course I did! Could whatever prejudices I harbored influence how I did my job, which at that time was to do a credible evaluation of his emotional status? Should I give a vague or heavily nuanced answer to a seven-year-old?

Being a psychiatrist, I thought of doing what psychiatrists do with questions like these, which is to answer a question by asking a question: Do you think I'm prejudiced? I decided to let that one go for some reason, although that may've been the wisest thing to do. These mental gymnastics in total probably took less than six or eight seconds.

So I lied. No, I'm not, I replied.

I could have told the literal truth and said yes, but then where would that have taken us? I think it was the right answer for that moment, since a broad smile broke out across his face, and from that point forward, he appeared comfortable in the interview. How nuanced a discussion could I have had with a seven-year-old? To someone that young, it really is an Are you pregnant or are you not? kind of question.

Truth was, I knew I came to that situation with multiple prejudices, no doubt harbored for life, of which I knew I would never be entirely free or perhaps even be aware. But despite my prejudices, I believed I could get the job done and had (I thought) many times before. Nevertheless, I knew I could never be completely certain that every word and sentence in my report for that day, or my attitude during the interview, was entirely without some measure of prejudice or, if you prefer, racism. So many of our thoughts and assumptions are steeped in prejudices, of which most of us are completely unaware. Could I have given a better answer? Would the reader have answered differently if asked the same question in a similar circumstance?

If the culture is dominated by something called systemic racism, how could any White physician examining any Black patient not be subject to any number of errors to which he/she might be completely unaware? In medical school, students are taught to take a history and do a physical examination. Of the two, we were taught that the history is more important (even though much more subjective) in that it will raise our suspicions regarding one diagnosis versus another, which can be confirmed or disconfirmed in the physical exam or in subsequent tests. Might a physician discount a symptom because of the way in which a Black person describes certain symptoms versus the way a White patient may describe the same symptoms? Physicians are taught, and learn from experience, that there are cultural differences in the way people describe symptoms. Decisions based on subjective impressions are 70 percent of the day-to-day practice of medicine. Prejudice can be a source of error even in the most well-meaning physician, especially in nonsurgical conditions.

In an era when American academic psychiatry was under the domination of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists were encouraged to undergo a personal psychoanalysis as part of their training since it was assumed that it would be impossible to work with the unconscious (or even conscious) thoughts and feelings of others without understanding one's own. We assume that one will unconsciously respond to universal tribal instincts, which will influence how we feel about race, ethnicity, gender, tribal identities, profession, etc. with unconscious and prejudicial reactions related to the psychiatrist's own past, personality, parenting, ethnic identity, culture, etc. For psychiatrists and others working with people, the goal is to neutralize or control these as much as possible. It is an acknowledgment of universal but only partly conscious problems in the business of human beings reacting emotionally to one another.

I've never met a human being free of prejudice. Most of us have many, and to some extent, we'd have trouble functioning without them. In my example of the seven-year-old, it was why I had so much trouble giving a strictly honest answer. Of course, I'm prejudiced. I have so many prejudices that trying to list them would be impossible since, for most, I may not understand them as prejudices. Prejudices begin early in life. Ideas about race, for example, are probably 90 percent formed by the age of eight or nine. They can certainly change with increasing familiarity, if that familiarity is allowed to develop.

Early in life, we believe our parents are authorities on every topic. If they give any opinion at all, we're more likely to believe them than someone else on most issues until perhaps adolescence, when we may be inclined to doubt anything they tell us. Even then, if we get along well with our parents, we're more likely to accept their views of the world. As we get older, we extend some of those prejudicial beliefs to our extended families or to tribal associations, like religion, ethnicity, neighborhoods, towns, schools, and countries.

As a child growing up in Chicago, each city block was like a separate town. I lived on the 5100 block of Lexington Avenue. My friends lived in the 5100 and 5200 blocks. We were the good people. Those living in the 4900 and 5300 blocks (the 5000 block was an empty field and industrial area) were suspect, except for those with whom we attended school. People we know are somehow better than those we don't. We feel safe around the familiar and less safe around the unfamiliar. Childhood represents at least seventeen years of prejudicial learning, which is impossible to avoid and difficult to unlearn since we don't understand them as prejudices but as often-unquestioned truth.

Sometimes the wiring of the brain plays a role in our prejudices. Stanford social psychologist Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, in her book Biased (2019), talks about her experience at the age of twelve when her family moved from an all-Black area of Cleveland where every significant figure in her life was Black—family, neighbors, friends, teachers, local businesspeople—to a nearly all-White suburb. Naturally, she was concerned about how she'd be received by her new schoolmates. She was surprised to see that most everyone was receptive to her, invited her to have lunch with them, and showed her around the school in a welcoming manner. However, she reports she had trouble making friends because she was having trouble remembering their names. She would find herself passing some of them in the hall and avoiding verbal contact because she was embarrassed by her affliction:

I'd had no practice recognizing White faces. They all looked alike to me. I could describe in detail the face of a Black woman I happened to pass in a shopping mall. But I could not pick out from a crowd the White girl who sat next to me in English class every day.

Even after these girls gave her a surprise birthday party at a restaurant, she still felt insecure about being able to remember their names. They also gave her gifts of albums by artists she'd never heard of, like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. She knew she had some kind of deficiency but didn't know what it was. At Harvard, she learned that hers was a common affliction known worldwide as the other-race effect that all members of all races experience. The developing brain from about three months on learns to key in on the faces of those it experiences most, and that learning becomes stronger as a child ages. Those who don't resemble those in its social milieu tend to be disregarded. This does not occur when children are adopted and raised by parents of a different race. She gives an example of some Black youth who learned that older Chinese women in Chinatown could not identify them in a lineup after their purses had been snatched. All Black teens looked alike to these women. Only by putting up cameras were they able to frustrate and catch these young culprits.

The tendency to associate Blackness with criminality was somehow picked up by her own five-year-old son. She was on an airplane where there was only one other Black male passenger. Her son said to her, I hope that man doesn't rob the plane. She recalled how much that hurt, and her son could not give a reason that he said what he did. It just came out. Most White people are raised in a White world. Especially when young, the appearance of a Black person in the context of an all-White world can seem discordant to someone who is used to something different. Is that discordance racism? I would have my doubts. Is this other-race effect why we stereotype Black people? Is this a natural process?

Religion

As mentioned in the introduction, I was educated first grade through college undergrad at Catholic institutions. The whole, and very explicitly stated, reason for their existence was to educate me and everyone else in the system to the religious and ethical beliefs of the Catholic Church. Of course, they also taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. I lived in a city which had a very extensive free (tax-supported) public educational system for which my parents would've had to pay nothing. Instead, they chose to pay tuition and fees to send me and my sister to these schools. While these were obviously private schools, they were not particularly exclusive in the sense that we think of private schools generally. In Chicago, they were attached to every Catholic parish that I knew of, most of which in those days were predominantly working-class or lower-middle-class neighborhoods.

My father and his siblings went to local public schools, but my mother and her siblings went to Catholic grade schools through eighth grade. My maternal grandparents did not read or write, were not particularly upwardly mobile, and my maternal grandfather—as a janitor—was about as working class as one could get. Culturally and religiously, this is what these people did. It was never thought of as indoctrination but as the proper way to inculcate Christian (to the extent that Catholic is the same as Christian) values and ethics into children. No one, even those who were irreligious, thought otherwise. Because discipline was considered tougher in these schools, parents believed that education was somehow better. The schools themselves never claimed to be academically better and made it clear that one went there for religious education and learned reading and writing as a collateral benefit.

We were taught that Protestant teachings were all heretical, and if one aspired to eternal salvation, only Catholicism would do. We said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and learned that the United States was the land of the free and the home of the brave, as occurred in every public school in the city. My wife had exactly the same experience K–12, but at Chicago Lutheran schools. Her schools taught that Martin Luther was a visionary. My schools taught that he was a heretic.

Were these schools (and parents) officially sanctioning the teaching of prejudicial views to schoolchildren? Of course, but they didn't see their views as examples of prejudice, but as wisdom and truth. Even if they didn't see every aspect of religion as literally true, it was close enough to be worthy of teaching children at this stage in their development. Our parents were not particularly religious but saw value in Catholic and Lutheran education for some reason. They were fused with our respective Italian and German cultures.

I think it's obvious that, with many inevitable exceptions, children raised to be Catholic grew up to be Catholic. Those raised to be Lutherans grew up to be Lutherans. Those in my neighborhood who were Greek and went to a Greek school grew up to be Greek Orthodox, and those raised Jewish and went to Hebrew schools grew up to be Jews. Muslims in Muslim cultures grow up to be Muslims. No real surprises here so far. All these religious schools taught the same prejudices as did the public schools about the country, its history, and the noble ideas at its foundation and one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. How else should it have been done? How do we teach about any religion or culture (or acculturate) without a heavy dose of prejudice? Shall we teach children that there are no absolute truths? That all is relative to one's cultural perspective? In first grade?

Language

Language is probably the single most important carrier of cultural prejudice. Many prejudices are very subtle and inculcated by the larger culture and not necessarily by the religion, family, neighborhood, or school. They can be no less powerful as we get older. A good example is language. In high school I studied Latin for two years, and in college, Spanish for one year. I am conversational in neither. Although there are not many Latin speakers out there these days, there are plenty of Latin medical and legal phrases, like foramen ovale, corpus callosum, habeas corpus, and quid pro quo, that show our Latin intellectual heritage. We may not realize it, but our Latin and Greek heritages influence our culture in ways we cannot realize—our alphabet, for example.

In reality, I only speak English and feel more comfortable with people who speak English. When traveling, I can only speak to English speakers. I gravitate toward English speakers who speak with an American or Canadian accent. There may be a host of other factors determining with whom I spend my time speaking while traveling. Speaking to someone from England or Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or Ireland—I simply cannot understand the garble that people from Scotland utter, so I avoid them—gives me the opportunity to see how they view the world, which I cannot get from an American English speaker. Still, unless someone from another part of the world speaks English in some form, I cannot communicate with them and feel uncomfortable trying. Even when home, I'm much more likely to feel comfortable speaking to those who speak English the way I do, and I'm more likely to stereotype or prejudge those with heavily foreign or regional accents even though I try not to. The way I speak is reflective of my cultural background.

African Americans often speak a different dialect than American-born White people or other American-born people of Color. This most likely is another result of institutional and systemic racism reflecting the separateness in education and living circumstances over the centuries and into the present. African Americans raised in the North seem to retain more of a Black Southern dialect than the children of Southern Whites raised in the North. Since I've spent the last fifty-plus years around doctors, many of whom came from areas of the world where English is not the dominant language, I've noticed that their children (some of whom are doctors now as well) speak with a Northern or Midwestern accent that sounds a lot like I sound. I do not recognize a separate dialect for Asians born here but with solidly East or South Asian