Hortense Powdermaker on Prejudice

An excerpt from Powdermaker’s short book, Probing Our Prejudices: A Unit for High School Students: “Bill plays marbles with a group of boys in his neighborhood, and one of them, John, a Polish boy, cheats. Bill then concludes that all Poles cheat, and he carries this idea with him throughout his life…when he is older, Bill reads in the paper that two Italians who were drunk got into a fight and one stabbed the other. Bill has never known any Italians but he swiftly jumps to the conclusion that all Italians are drunkards and stab each other in the back. Or he hears of a Mexican who stole some money from his boss, and so, forever after, he thinks of all Mexicans as thieves.In all three cases Bill concluded that because one member of a group acted in a certain way, all members of that group will act the same way. This type of poor reasoning is called false generalization. To generalize is to come to a general conclusion as a result of learning particular facts or ideas. For example, if you are a member of a club that functions well at every meeting and lives up to its standards, you may justifiably say, ‘We have a good club.’ This is a true generalization based on observation. If, however, you observe another club during only one of its meetings when nothing is accomplished, and you say, ‘That club is no good,’ you are making a false generalization, because you have not based your conclusion on sufficient evidence.We all suffer from this unfortunate habit of making false generalizations, especially about racial or religious groups or nationalities other than our own. We do not make them as frequently about our own group. If we are white Protestants and a member of our group cheats, we do not say, ‘All Catholics are liars.’ In order to be clear-thinking individuals we must realize this inconsistency and avoid making false generalizations.”

Questions What are the main problems raised in the case study?What kinds of questions would an anthropologist ask?How would you resolve the situation?

Tips:

• The whys and the hows are the most important here. For example: how do you know that these are the problems? How do you know that this is the best solution for the situation? I am not interested in what the thing is because I can read that for myself. Rather, I am interested in how you arrived at your own conclusions and why you think that way.
•  What concepts do the anthropologists draw on, and how can you use that same knowledge to come to a deeper understanding of what’s happening?