| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
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order to answer this question, we have to take their function into account. The function of stereotypes is to legitimise and fortify a political attitude and to maintain a position that is conducive to a particular strategy. Prejudices help to support a specific power structure that perpetuates inequality and leads to the derogation, devaluation, and exploitation of one group by another. The attraction of prejudices has to do with perpetuating a power structure, with a deep-felt gratification of being right and possessing a shockproof legitimacy for strategic behaviour. If they are articulated under stress, in situations heated by conflict, prejudices contribute to the escalation and perpetuation of the conflict. They thrive and spread in times of conflict, when finer shades and differentiations are suddenly swept away and strict “either/or” alternatives become compulsory. In such a situation, they enforce mass unanimity and a clear orientation which is less a response to the crisis than a symptom of the crisis itself.
4. Prejudice and Memory
4.1. Memes
In order to explain the spreading, the sticking, and the retentiveness of prejudices, it may help to consider them in relation to memory. As far as I can see, little systematic research has yet been done on the important connection between prejudice and memory, combining the tools of social psychology and memory studies. We have already encountered areas in which the study of prejudice and memory overlap: in the context of social frames, as conceived by Maurice Halbwachs, and in the theory of ideology as a consensus, or a shared fund, of images, ideas, and memories, as conceived by Sacvan Bercovitch—which could also be described as collective memory. I want to introduce here a rather marginal approach to memory studies that was made in the last quarter of the twentieth century by Richard Dawkins. In 1976 he used for the first time the term meme in analogy to gene. What genes are to the physical organism, memes are to the memory (Dawkins 1989; Dennett 1991; Blackmore 1999).7 While genes are the carriers of what is passed on via