Everybody’s Prejudiced

Introduction

Everybody’s Prejudiced

Let me save you the trouble of wondering where I’m coming from. I’m going to put my own prejudices on the table before I ask you to examine yours. That’s the deal. The only way this book earns the right to say what it’s going to say is if the person writing it goes first.

This book was written by a Christian white man. I want to address that directly, because prejudice is often portrayed as something white people observe in others, study from a distance, or experience only as the people who hold it instead of the people it’s aimed at. That framing is wrong, and it’s part of what this book is arguing against.

White people experience prejudice. Men experience prejudice. Christians experience prejudice. Working-class people experience prejudice. Old people experience prejudice. People with disabilities experience prejudice. Veterans experience prejudice. The same process works in every direction. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make it untrue. It just makes it invisible to the people who most need to see it.

I’m writing this book because I’ve experienced prejudice from multiple directions, held prejudice in multiple directions, and spent decades watching the same mechanism produce harm regardless of which way it was pointed. I wanted to write an honest book about that, agenda-free, applying the same standard no matter who held the bias or who it was aimed at. That required someone willing to go first with their own prejudices before asking anyone else to examine theirs. I qualified on every count.

One more thing. I’m not a sociologist, a psychologist, a researcher, or an academic of any kind. I’m a person. I have the same brain producing the same automatic judgments that every other person has. I’ve lived inside the same mess everyone else is living inside. The research in this book is real, and I’ve tried to represent it accurately. But the engine of the book isn’t research. It’s observation, sixty-plus years of watching how this works in actual rooms with actual people.

That’s the only qualification I’m claiming. It turns out to be enough.

I want to address that directly, because prejudice is often portrayed as something white people observe in others, study from a distance, or experience only as the people who hold it instead of the people it’s aimed at. That framing is wrong, and it’s part of what this book is arguing against.

White people experience prejudice. Men experience prejudice. Christians experience prejudice. Working-class people experience prejudice. Old people experience prejudice. People with disabilities experience prejudice. Veterans experience prejudice. The same process operates in every direction.

Table of contents

Everybody’s Prejudiced

• A Note on the Author
• Introduction: I’ll Go First
• Part One: How It Gets In
• Chapter 1: Installed Before You Can Question It
• Chapter 2: The Wiring – Tribalism, the Brain, and Why This Never Goes Away
• Chapter 3: Small Cruelties
• Chapter 4: Culture, Religion, and the Air You Breathe
• Chapter 5: The Stories We Were Handed
• Part Two: What It Looks Like
• Chapter 6: Race
• Chapter 7: Gender
• Chapter 8: Religion
• Chapter 9: Class
• Chapter 10: Age
• Chapter 11: Disability
• Part Three: How It Survives
• Chapter 12: How Prejudice Survives
• Chapter 13: DEI, Good Intentions, and What Actually Works
• Part Four: The Full Count
• Chapter 14: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
• Chapter 15: The Body
• Chapter 16: The Prejudices Nobody Names
• Chapter 17: From the Inside, and From the Side
• Chapter 18: What Trauma Builds
• Chapter 19: When the Mechanism Runs Free
• Part Five: What Rational People Do
• Chapter 20: Contact
• Chapter 21: The Veterans – Holding the Line
• Chapter 22: The Only Prejudice I Can Defend
• Chapter 23: Claudia
• Epilogue: The Only Prejudice That Makes Sense
• Notes and Sources
• About This Series
• Enemies of You Series
• Index