Musing: Identities and Prejudices

In quest to find the roots of prejudice in our society, I've always encounter what I called the identity overload. First of all, let me postulate that prejudices are inexplicably linked to our social identity. Be it racial, national, religious, gender, whatever. When a person harbor strong feelings toward a certain creed of social identity, he/she will certainly have prejudice against other creed of that particular social identity.

Human has long ago learned that to survive (and to have a chance to dominate), we need to form communities. That's where group identities emerge, and with it, the earliest form of prejudice. Although I have no concrete data, I would venture that during tribal era, the predominant identity is actually geopolitical in nature. Due to the lack of transportation method, different races had yet to meet, so the struggle is among people of the same race under different leaders at different location.

Later when strong leaders emerged and united the warring tribes into a nation/culture, two identities emerged: racism and nationalism. These two concepts often juxtaposed and fueled one another, since earlier societies are often formed with a predominant race and several (or no) lesser races.

Around the 3rd century, another strong identity started emerging after Constantine I convene the first council of Nicaea. It's what I called the cultural/religious identity. Many might argue there were earlier religions, but I would theorize that earlier cultural identities take a much inferior role as compared to the two main identities: nationalism and racism. After the roman orthodoxy was formed, it became an identity that rival the importance of racial and national identities.

These three main identities and its relevant prejudices still rule our society till today. It's not something that can be solved by political correctness. In fact, I often felt that as human being, they are part of our nature and we have to live with this reality. That is not to say we should succumb to bigotry, rather to accept them as a constant challenge to our logical mind and always keep our own prejudice in check. ("Liberal" people run the risk of believing they are above prejudice, such is not the case.)

You might notice I have omitted sexism from the above trio. The reason I did so was that Sexism is something more primal than any of the three I mentioned above. It predated the concept of tribes, and still run rampant in modern society; A strong identity and prejudice like this cannot be discussed together with race, nation and religion simply because it's something much old, much stronger and much consistent.

I do not possess enough knowledge to delve deep into this topic, but I again theorize that Sexism stemmed from the tradition that male dominant societies survived better during earlier time. Procreation was a big issue, especially during the prehistoric era, and since then, homophobia was cultured to encourage heterosex and suppress homosex. Again, homophobia could only be formed if homosex had already existed, and I would venture that it was formed as soon as the first homosex was performed, and it had been a gruesome battle all the way till today. So as can be seen, homophobia and sexism are something much more primal and powerful than what I call social prejudice.

The point I am trying to make (if there is one), is that if we accept the idea that as long as different racial identities (Note: NOT "races". There's a world of difference between the two) exist, racism must exist, then we must also accept that as long as homosex exists, homophobia must exists. This is (again), not not to say we should succumb to bigotry, rather to accept them as a constant challenge to our logical mind and always keep our own prejudice in check. (And never assumed that being a gay exempted you from being homophobic. If you think so, examine your thoughts again.)