Contact can Create Prejudice

Te Ao Hou, December 1963, Page 16

Contact can Create Prejudice The other school is in a middle-upper income area, where there are probably not more than four or five Maori children out of the five hundred in the school. Here these children were absorbed without comment. In one school prejudice frequently showed itself, in the other the question barely arises. Contact can create prejudice. I should like to quote to you what Norman Podhoretz, Editor of the American journal ‘Commentary’, has to say of this. Podhoretz describes his boyhood in a lower class immigrant section of New York. He tells of how he was bullied by Negro children and of how it became impossible to bridge the gap by direct communication and goes on to describe the conflict between his own feelings and his present convictions. He says ‘I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes … in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favour of the convictions.’ I would go so far as to say that most white New Zealanders do not acknowlede their negative feelings about Maoris or other nonwhites not because they do not have them, but because they do not have to do so. Would increased contact between Maori and white children help? All I can say is that I don't know, but as a practising teacher I am ready to try it and to this end am attempting to arrange a series of exchanges between my own class and one in the inner city involving each class spending one day a week for some weeks in the other's school. I am not sure that the value of this will be lasting but it is worth a try.