ABSTRACT
In American history, the 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is the emblematic story of a black slave who learned to read and write, who acquired the forbidden education, and to inspire the abolitionist movement. To study prejudice scientifically requires some sense of it as a phenomenon and one in need of study. Studying prejudices requires the consciousness that all peoples have prejudices, that any group will develop customs and ways of thinking that lead the group members to form prejudgments. Similarly, in the domains of legislation or political categorisation, strange mixtures of Enlightenment, universalism, and prejudice intermingled. In the second half of the twentieth century, scientific study of prejudice could begin because there had been a long preparatory period— from the French Revolution forward—of political movements organising around a shared sense of victimhood or oppression and identifying the ideological components of their oppression.
