Handbook of Prejudice By Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, and Karin ...

convinced that stereotyping “harms whites no less than blacks” (42). An important insight of Ellison's, again similar to that of Virginia Woolf, was that Negro writers and writers of other minorities must not leave the power to define them to white American writers, but must instead depict the experience of their own groups: “A people must define itself, and minorities have the responsibility of having their ideals and images recognised as part of the composite image which is that of the still forming American people” (44).

6. Interpersonal and Intergroup Interaction

According to psychosociologists, a consciousness of group membership together with a readiness for ethnic identification and in-group loyalty starts at the age of five (Allport 2000, 31).⁹ An in-group is defined as an aggregate of people that all use the pronoun we with the same specificity. It has been remarked, however, that individuals are members of more than one in-group, including, among others, the family, the neighbourhood, the town, city, or region with its landscape and dialect, the peer group, the generation, the gender group, the club, the professional group and its organisations, the social class, the church, the political party, the nation. These in-groups are not necessarily neatly arranged in a concentric shape, with the “thick”, face-to-face relationships in the middle and the “thinner” and more abstract memberships forming the outer circles.¹⁰ I had a surprising in-group experience in the middle of an out-group. On a late Sunday morning, I stood in the doorway of a church in Tromsö, in the extreme north of Norway, listening to the end of the service. Due to my familiarity with the Lutheran liturgy, I could understand the words and predict the melodies that were sung by the congregation in the closing phase of the service. Religion crosses languages and national borders, and so does art; next to works specific to the region, the museum of Tromsö showed works of the European canon (even though the state is not a member of the EU). The principle of multiple membership balances the collectivism with individualism, which is the normative value system of a democracy (Sen 2007). The free and relaxed choice of mutually compatible in-group