ABSTRACT
It is already well established that the verb 'to be prejudiced' is hardly ever used in its first person singular - which renders its direct measurement extremely difficult. Yet, even without scientific measurement, we still know that prejudice has been around for a very long time, as the following extract from Dickens's Little Dorrit suggests:
In the first place they (the English) were vaguely persuaded that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country ... In the third place, they had a notion that it was a sort of Divine Visitation upon a foreigner that he was not an Englishman, and that all kinds of calamities happened to his country because it did things that England did not, and did not do things that England did ... They believed that foreigners were always immoral and ... had no independent spirit... Although he (the foreigner) could never hope to be an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his head. They began to accomodate themselves to his level... but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and childish English - more, because he didn't mind it, and laughed too. They spoke to him in very loud voices as if he were stone deaf. They constructed sentences, by way of teaching him the language in its purity, such as were addressed by the savages to Captain Cook, or by Friday to Robinson Crusoe.
We also know that, with perhaps a few modifications, Dickens could have written a similar piece today. On this evidence, therefore, whatever the precise meaning of 'prejudice' may be, we certainly know that it is slow to change. And it is tempting to ask why on earth we should bother to measure it and not channel our resources instead into attempts at its reduction or elimination. So before describing some of the traditional and newer methods of quantifying racial prejudice, it is necessary to make the case for measurement in the first place.