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inclination that inhibits impartial judgment” in relation to those I love.
    These days, the term “prejudice” is more often used when the negative attributes ascribed to a person by virtue of his or her being a member of a disdained or despised group are highlighted, or when we voice our feelings toward the pariah group itself. We are always prepared to judge members of such a group severely,
and to assume negative behavior or characteristics prior to any evidence. For the purposes of this book, that will be the usage.
    It may well be that prejudice against some group, any group—Jews and blacks being historically the most common—is an inevitable consequence of the need to identify with one specific group. I sense this to be true, since almost everyone I encounter exhibits some evidence of prejudice, although I am not yet convinced that in distinguishing “us” from “them” we need to demean “them.” The ubiquity of prejudice may be a natural consequence of idealizing one’s own. Since the idealization stops at the border of one’s family or group, the cold, objective eye reserved for the other perceives his inadequacy in contrast to the idealized version of one’s own.
    Prejudice actually works toward it. We are likely to expend little emotion on the prejudiced group. We have eliminated those people from our universe of concern. Prejudice often results in a cool indifference—indifference to the sensibilities and even the suffering of those who do not count. Still, the most profound modern statement of the result of racial prejudice in the United States is the Ralph Ellison novel published in 1952 and appropriately titled The Invisible Man . Here the protagonist struggles to be seen , to become part of the community that seems always oblivious to his needs or his pain.
    It should be clear that by distinguishing prejudice from hatred, I am not defining prejudice as less destructive than hatred. Less evil, perhaps, but not less dangerous. The lack of passion and hatred in typical prejudice may contribute to equally great affronts to human dignity. Whereas the hater must demonize the object of its hatred, the prejudiced individual is more likely to dehumanize the object. Slavery, the most iniquitous of human institutions, is a result of such dehumanizing. The slave for the most part was neither loved nor hated. He was chattel at worst. At best, he was treated like a domesticated animal that could be loved as a pet
and often more easily disposed of. Slavery demands a violation of that central moral condition, the Kantian imperative never to treat any human being as a means rather than an end. The end result of slavery is as indecent and evil as the cruelty that hatred would produce in the madness of the Holocaust.
    Compounding the evil, slavery was accepted by the good citizens in some cultures without shame or apology. Because of this ability to detach the population of the oppressed from membership in the human race, even the most extreme cruelty often went unrecognized. Prejudice turned to hatred in the United States with the liberation of the slaves; when their humanity was reclaimed; when the slaves become a human force; when the fear, if not the guilt, of the white populations was triggered.
    For the quintessential statement on how prejudice plays out without hatred one must turn to America’s great moral master-piece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . In a scene so brief as to invite being passed over, Mark Twain captured the essence of prejudice.
    In a confusing event of mistaken identity that resists replication here, Huck attempts to flimflam kindly and maternal Aunt Sally by passing himself off as Tom Sawyer. In order to explain his delayed arrival he confabulates an explosion aboard a steamboat:
    â€œWe blowed out a cylinder head.”
    â€œGood gracious! Anybody hurt?”
    â€œNo’m. Killed a Nigger.”
    â€œWell it’s