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 is 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 have experienced prejudice from several directions and held it in several directions, and I have 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 is mine.
What does the author disclose about himself?
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 have 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 am 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 had 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 had ever dealt with. The theory did not 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.
What is the contradiction the book cannot resolve?
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 is also the man who found the swastikas I had 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 was not 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 am not sure it can be resolved. The book does not pretend to have resolved it.
What is 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 are 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 will not 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, which is its own form of agreement.
That is 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 have not been given the vocabulary that would make them visible.
What is the only prejudice the book defends?
Against people who have already demonstrated what they are.
The working definition in that chapter is somebody who has shown, through sustained and deliberate behaviour, 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 is not prejudice. It is the opposite operation, and a book arguing against categorical thinking has to be able to say where judgment is legitimate or it is not 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 had wanted to. I had expected the bill and would have paid it without complaint.
The note attached was handwritten, which was consistent with how John operated. Paper documentation of anything he considered important, delivered in his own hand.
I have 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.
What is the parking lot really about?
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 had 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 is the sentence I would keep if I could only keep one. It is how installation works. Somebody hands you something before you are capable of evaluating it, and decades later you are the one sitting in the car.
Where does the argument end up?
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 have 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 the author an expert on prejudice?
No, and the book says so on the first page.
I am 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 have lived inside the same mess.
The research in the book is real and I have worked to represent it accurately. The argument is not built on credentials. It is 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 is no pedestal here. I have done some things well, some things badly, and a great many things without noticing what I was doing.
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