The Bases of Race Prejudice

Abstract

P REJUDICE, even race prejudice, no matter how reprehensible in itself, is profoundly human phenomenon. As such, it deserves, perhaps, to be defended against those who inveigh against it, as if it were not common human weakness in which we all, more or less, share. It is not, however, in precisely this sense that President John Grier Hibben, of Princeton, wrote some years agohis Defense of Prejudice. He sought to show that prejudice was, as he says, a natural factor in any thinking, and not to be regarded in any sense as an abnormal and disturbing element.