Page 356 - The Social Animal

338 The Social Animal

Africans in an attempt to find reasons for their negative attitudes to-
ward blacks. He found that the typical white South African was con-
vinced that the great majority of crimes were committed by
blacks—an erroneous belief. How did such a misconception develop?
The individuals reported that they saw many black convicts working
in public places; they never saw any white convicts. Didn’t this prove
that blacks were convicted of more crimes than whites? No. In fact,
the rules forbade white convicts from working in public places! In
short, a society can create prejudiced beliefs by the unquestioned
practices of its major institutions. In our own recent history, laws and
customs that forced blacks to ride in the back of the bus, kept women
out of prestigious clubs, and prevented Jews from staying at exclusive
hotels all perpetuated prejudices through conformity. If the rules re-
quire us to treat “those people” that way, after all, we’ll go along. My
country, club, and hotel must have a reason . . . mustn’t it?

Reducing Prejudice

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate but equal
schools were, by definition, unequal. In the words of Chief Justice
Earl Warren, when black children are separated from white children
on the basis of race alone, it “generates a feeling of inferiority as to
their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds
in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Without our quite realizing it,
this decision launched our nation into one of the most exciting large-
scale social experiments ever conducted.
In the aftermath of this historic decision, many people were op-
posed to integrating the schools on “humanitarian” grounds. They
predicted a holocaust if the races were forced to mingle in schools.
They argued that laws cannot force people to get along with each
other. This echoed the sentiments of the distinguished sociologist
William Graham Sumner, who, years earlier, had stated, “Stateways
don’t change folkways.” Sumner meant that you cannot legislate
morality or tolerance. Many people urged that desegregation be de-
layed until attitudes could be changed.
Social psychologists at that time believed that if you want to
change what people do, you first have to change the way they think.
If you can get bigoted white adults to feel less prejudiced toward