ABSTRACT
Ethnic prejudice defines certain categories of humanity as outsiders or deviants; more broadly, tribal stigma defines members of the disfavored categories as deviants. Tribal stigmata are transmitted through ancestry of lineage. Persons so designated haven’t done anything wrong, but parties who are prejudiced against them persist in their prejudices anyway. Unfair as it is, this is the sociological reality that we have to struggle to fully understand and work to overturn. Why do racism, prejudice, and discrimination exist? Sociologists argue that one reason why interethnic hostility arises is that two or more human categories conflict for scarce resources. Clearly, hostility can work in any conceivable direction, with members of less powerful groups feeling unfavorably toward those in more powerful ones and vice versa. Sometimes conflicts between and among ethnic categories take a more ominous path and the dominant group’s political claims verminize a category of the population and results in genocide—the mass slaughter of enormous numbers of the members of an ethnic category of humanity simply because of their membership in a particular group. Racism against African Americans in the United States, hatred in the West of Islam and of Muslims, the hatred of Jews by a substantial percentage of the population almost everywhere, as well as prejudice against Palestinians in Israel illustrates how tribal stigma transforms the “other” into deviants.
