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Race Relations
365
came to be as it is. Thus Lillian Smith, in
Killers of the Dream
,
presents what Allport refers to as an “atmosphere theory” of preju
dice. According to this view, the Southern white child—which ob
viously has no knowledge of the historical background of the
contemporary patterns of race relations and which also has no under
standing of the economic and political factors involved—very early
begins to mirror the prejudiced attitudes which it sees in the world
around it because it soon learns that it must conform to the patterns
of race relations even when it senses that they are quite inconsistent
with its own inner feelings of love and with the moral teachings of
Christianity.28 Other situational approaches stress the impact of the
current level of employment and various aspects of economic com
petition. Still others stress the influence of the present types of con
tact between the different groups and the importance of the relative
density of the groups without attempting to explain the reasons why
the present situations have come into being or why they are so
resistent to change. Clearly, both the sociocultural and the situational
theories, like the historical theory, shed light upon the origin of
prejudice and group hostility, but none of these types of causation
operates in a completely deterministic way.
In addition to the foregoing approaches, which place the emphasis
upon the broad social context in which personality develops, Allport
describes two other methods of causal analysis which focus attention
on the agent and one which focuses it upon the object of dislike and
hostility.
Psychodynamic
theories of prejudice stress the importance
of the structure and dynamics of personality. It may be argued, for
example, that prejudice is caused by frustration. When the fulfillment
of a person’s basic needs is denied, he experiences deprivation and
frustration which lead to the development of hostility. If this hostility
is not controlled and directed against the object which has caused
the frustration, it comes to be directed against some other object by
a process of transference. Thus, a minority group is frequently used
as a scapegoat upon which the blame for one’s own failures or the
failure of the dominant group is transferred. As the result of this
process, members of the dominant group come to hate members of the
minority group. The Jews in Germany served as such a scapegoat
under the Nazis prior to and during World War IL By the somewhat
different mechanism of projection, a minority group frequently serves
28 See Lillian Smith,
Killers of the Dream
, New York, W. W. Norton
Company, 1949, pp. 17ff.