This book was written by a Christian white man, and I want to address that directly, because prejudice is usually written about as something white people observe in others, study from a distance, or hold instead of receive.
That framing is wrong, and arguing against it’s part of what the book is for. White people experience prejudice. Men do. Christians do. Working-class people, old people, people with disabilities, veterans. The same mechanism runs in every direction, and pretending otherwise is the same categorical thinking the book spends four hundred pages arguing against.
I’ve experienced prejudice from several directions and held it in several directions, and I’ve spent decades watching the mechanism produce harm regardless of which way it was pointed. I wanted an honest book that applied one standard everywhere, with no exceptions for the directions that are currently more comfortable to name.
That required somebody willing to go first with their own prejudices before asking anybody else to examine theirs. I qualified on every count, so the introduction is called I’ll Go First, and it’s mine.
Should a writer disclose their own prejudices?
I start with the most flattering one, because flattering is an easy place to start.
I prefer women doctors, women bankers, and women in customer service. Given equivalent credentials I lean toward the woman almost every time, and I’ve justified it to myself for most of my adult life. What I have never done is test whether my experience proves what I think it proves, or whether I’m giving a flattering name to something that functions like any other bias.
Then it gets less comfortable. I grew up terrified of Black people because my parents told me directly and repeatedly that Black people smelled bad and would kill me without hesitation, delivered with the same matter-of-fact authority they used for anything else they knew to be true.
The bus seat ended that. Within a week we were friends. His name was Sam, and we spent two years of afternoons together. I never told my parents, because they would have found a way to end it.
What those two years gave me was the fact of Sam. A particular person with a particular temperament and particular interests, none of which had anything to do with the category I had been handed.
The book on this: Everybody’s Prejudiced examines how prejudice is installed before you can question it, how it survives, and what changes it, beginning with the author’s own.
What did thirty years of an unexamined belief look like?
A theory about Mormons eating babies. Literally. Ritually.
My mother told me that when I was a child and it sat in my head for three decades, never examined and never tested, quietly producing a low-level wariness about a large religious community I’d never encountered.
In my late twenties a genealogy project took me to a Family History Center run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I pulled into the parking lot, turned off the car, and sat there for an hour. Not terror. The low-grade version of the same response.
The people inside were the most patient and helpful researchers I’d ever dealt with. The theory didn’t survive five seconds of actual contact.
Years later I met Erika, who performs as Karma, a gothic Mormon belly dancer who has been a close friend for a long time now. Every conversation with her is another small demolition of a category that should never have survived one.
Can anybody write about prejudice without being prejudiced?
My father, and I have never worked him out.
He used racial and ethnic slurs the way other people use punctuation. Not in rage and not as performance. In the ordinary course of describing the neighbors, the news, and the people he met at the grocery store. When he first met my wife, a Guatemalan woman I loved for nearly twelve years, I watched a split second of undisguised fury cross his face. She saw it too. Neither of us ever raised it with him.
He’s also the man who found the swastikas I’d chalked on the sidewalk.
I was ten and had been recruited into a Nazi club by a charming bald kid named Barry, who told me it was our special symbol. I spent a summer believing I was in a secret society. My father sat me down, explained what the symbol was, and said it was evil, and he wasn’t a man who used that word lightly. Then he went and spoke to some of the other men in the neighborhood. Barry and his father were gone within days.
The same man. I have never fully resolved that, and I’m not sure it can be resolved. The book doesn’t pretend to have resolved it.
What’s Everybody’s Prejudiced arguing?
That the mechanism is universal, automatic, and never goes away, and that this is the starting point, not an excuse.
The first part is how it gets installed before you’re capable of questioning it. Family, culture, religion, the stories you were handed, and the wiring underneath all of it that makes category-forming automatic in every human brain.
Then it works through what it looks like in practice across race, gender, religion, class, age, disability, sexual orientation, the body, and the prejudices nobody names. Then how prejudice survives, including a chapter on good intentions and what changes outcomes.
The last part is about what rational people do, and the answer the evidence keeps returning is contact. Not information. Not argument. A particular person with particular interests who won’t fit the category.
What are the prejudices nobody names?
Try this at work. Say that you think somebody’s accent makes him sound less intelligent.
Now say you think his race makes him less qualified.
The second sentence clears the room. The first might not. It might produce murmured agreement, or it might produce nothing. Nothing is its own form of agreement.
That’s a whole chapter. Prejudices that operate in plain sight because nobody has classified them as prejudices yet. They run on exactly the same mechanism as every other one in the book. They simply haven’t been given the vocabulary that would make them visible.
Is any prejudice defensible?
Against people who have already demonstrated what they are.
The working definition in that chapter is somebody who has shown, through sustained and deliberate behavior, that they regard other people as instruments or obstacles and not as people. I use a blunt word for it, not a clinical one, because precision matters more there than comfort does.
The distinction that makes it defensible is the one the entire book rests on. Pre-judgment is the problem. Substituting a category for an individual is the problem.
Judging somebody on sustained evidence of their own conduct isn’t prejudice. It’s the opposite operation, and a book arguing against categorical thinking has to be able to say where judgment is legitimate or it isn’t saying anything.
What does the chapter on veterans describe?
An invoice for zero dollars.
It arrived on a Tuesday about two weeks after an emergency had ended. Nothing in the contract obligated that company to respond to an emergency call over a holiday weekend, and nothing would have stopped them billing holiday rates if they’d wanted to. I’d expected the bill and would have paid it without complaint.
The note attached was handwritten. That was consistent with how John operated. Paper documentation of anything he considered important, delivered in his own hand.
I’ve written about that firm elsewhere. It belongs in this book because of what I did with it afterward, which was to go looking for more people like them, and because a book about categorical thinking has to be honest about the categories it forms in the other direction too.
How do you recognize your own prejudice?
An hour I spent sitting in a car outside a Family History Center in my late twenties.
Not phobia. Not dramatic terror. The low-grade friction of a belief I’d never once examined, doing its quiet work on an ordinary Tuesday in a parking lot.
The belief was my mother’s. The parking lot was mine.
That’s the sentence I’d keep if I could only keep one. It’s how installation works. Somebody hands you something before you’re capable of evaluating it, and decades later you’re the one sitting in the car.
How should a book about prejudice end?
In the last chapter, which is a person, not an idea.
Claudia Elena, and I use her first name only, because some privacy remains owed. She was born in Guatemala City in 1962, the middle child of a large family, in circumstances she described to me incompletely and obliquely across nearly twelve years, the way people describe formative hardship when they’ve decided to live forward from it instead of back through it.
A book that spends four hundred pages arguing that categories hide the specific, irreplaceable things about a person has to finish by showing one. Not as an example. As the thing the argument was for.
Is Richard Lowe an expert on prejudice?
No, and the book says so on the first page.
I’m not a sociologist, a psychologist, a researcher, or an academic of any kind. I have the same brain producing the same automatic judgments as everybody else and I’ve lived inside the same mess.
The research in the book is real and I’ve worked to represent it accurately. The argument isn’t built on credentials. It’s built on decades of watching how this works in actual rooms with actual people, including the rooms where I was the one getting it wrong.
There’s no pedestal here. I’ve done some things well, some things badly, and a great many things without noticing what I was doing.
