I am sitting in a twelfth floor of the Bloomington Sheraton, watching the traffic blissfully zip along 494, which passes for the lower intestine of the Minneapolis-St Paul gastrointestinal tract. I am here for the February Collaboration conference. "The Collaboration" represents a considerable number of colleges between North Dakota and New Orleans. Today I heard a lecture on "Becoming Global Souls: Building Inter-cultural Competence." The lecture handout included this pearl of wisdom, under the heading of "Contact Theory."
Ethnic intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice.
That's a nice idea, and the speaker assured us that it was backed up by overwhelming evidence, gathered by a mountain of studies. The only thing I can see wrong with it is that it isn't true. Universal experience tells us that real prejudice requires an intimate familiarity with the other. In my native state of Arkansas, racial prejudice is relatively mild in towns that are mostly white. It is intense in towns that are racially mixed.
But in fact the speaker knew this. She emphasized that contact reduces prejudice only "under certain conditions." I am not certain that we know what those conditions are. But The Collaboration is trying to identify them. That is what a handful of Northern Professors are up to this weekend. By the way: Northern State University received an award for supporting the efforts of the Collaboration since its beginning.
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