Prejudice & Culture Arguments

Prejudice and arguments of culture
M. Asadi


Whoever condemns an entire group based on homogenizing generalizations or takes racial divisions as “real� has to take refuge in either biological or cultural arguments. Since biological explanations have been discredited scientifically, there being more genetic variation within so called “races� than between them, the natural tendency for the prejudiced is to invoke differences based on culture, the blueprint according to which a group conducts life. This dependence on culture itself damages the homogenization tendency of prejudice because culture can never produce the same uniformity as biology does, neither is it static and unchanging.

Holding the ethnocentric assumptions of those condemning a culture constant, dealing with which we could ask the question: "Civilized based on whose standards?", the cultural argument fails on another front as well.Those who condemn a culture are in actual fact blaming the material structure that gives rise to a culture (as adaptation) and by extension the fact (whether they acknowledge it or not) that this structure is not “invented� by people within a culture. It either preexists them and is dependent on historical heritage in static pre-modern societies (historical externality) or is adopted via social-psychological adaptation to conditions (we can call it stress externality) imposed on the people (in post modern, elite dominated societies), as in the case of the Black ghetto in the U.S. In this path from pre-modern to postmodern, in the modernity intermediary period there is rapid flux in mode of existence, normlessness and a state of anomie persists.

Therefore if culture in its origin is “external� as we have deduced then the “problem� of a pathological (uncivilized as some might say) culture cannot be overcome by “internal� solutions because the “cause� that gave birth to it, the structure imposed externally by the elite has not been dealt with. Cultural indoctrination of people living in an area where authentication of it is not obtained in the everyday experience of the people will fail in being adopted. Therefore all solutions from “within� are bound to fail. The enemy does in fact lie "without".