What are some ways to be prejudiced?
Prejudice is more than cartoon hatred; it is the thousand quiet shortcuts our minds take to keep power’s hierarchy intact. It appears in explicit slurs and also in the genteel compliment that assumes a whole people share the same talent. It surfaces when hiring managers trust résumés with familiar surnames, when urban planners route highways through Black neighborhoods, when men interrupt women mid-sentence because their ears rank certain voices higher. Algorithms trained on skewed data automate the bias, while well-meaning charities “serve” communities they do not trust to lead. Even silence can be prejudiced when it lets jokes, policing patterns or housing covenants go unchallenged. Prejudice persists because it functions like infrastructure: invisible to beneficiaries, crushing to those underneath.
The activist task is radical self-audit. Which unearned comforts do you still defend? Where do your reflexes betray learned hierarchy? Start there, then redesign daily routines as if equality were non-negotiable. What prejudice-uprooting experiment will you run this week?