If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.
- George Aiken
Our student email homepage has a 'quote of the day' that has provided a number of interesting, pithy, humorous, sardonic (all right, not really, I just wanted a nominal reason for exercising some of the more impressive parts of my adjectival lexicon) quotations. The quotation that was on the page today, copied above, is especially interesting and to me appears to be wholly true (something that isn't that common for an art-form, quotations are definitely an artform, that emphasizes simplicity and and pithiness over truth).
What do you think about the validity of Aiken's assessment? I guess the more interesting question in many ways, is if you believe it is true, why? If prejudice is more based on a need to discriminate than the actual forms of discrimination: race, creed, color: why do we have that need?
In contextualizing the question, in thinking about why I might discriminate, I realized that in a strange way it might be associated with a desire to be successful. Success is often relative: it's not getting a 100 percent on a test it's getting an 85 on a test that had an average of 6 percent (tough test, perhaps it was on k-pop). And we seem to have this pressing desire to succeed, to be special, and so we need a group of people to be 'lower' be it based on race, religion, ethnicity, or test score. This of course isn't the whole reason, ignorance, fear, and other factors play a large role in many current prejudices. But I think the need to discriminate, Aiken's idea that if you removed all current prejudices we would quickly develop new ones, is in many ways based on this idea that we need to be better than others, we need to be successful. Obviously this desire to be successful, ambition, can take more benign forms even as we attempt to be better than others. But perhaps the better option is to redefine success in terms that aren't relative. I don't know, these are some pretty off-the-top-of-my-head ideas, and like most ideas thus categorized, it is probably highly idealistic, a little pretentious, and quite a bit aggrandized. But I kind of like the idea of defining success not by comparison but by internal intuition.
