Nathan Alexander presents a working paper on 'The Curse of Race Prejudice': A History of the Concept of 'Race Prejudice' in American Life'

This article will form an early chapter of my book project, "The Meanings of 'Racism': A History of the Concept." In the article, I discuss the history of the concept "race prejudice" in American history and explore some of the counter-intuitive ways it has been used. The most straightforward sense of this idea was to protest against those whites who seemingly held pre-conceived and wrongheaded views of black people and who justified slavery or segregation on these grounds. But the concept could also be deployed by those whites who wished to reinforce the racial status quo, by appealing to unconquerable “prejudices” which existed between the races that made interracial harmony forever impossible. In the article, I also suggest how the notion of "race prejudice" located the responsibility for racial inequality within the psychology of individuals. To fight racial inequality then was simply a matter of correcting erroneous thinking. The naivete of this approach would become clearer in the twentieth century, when people began to consider the institutional or structural factors that contributed to racial inequality.