Prejudice is a "rigid and irrational generalization about an entire category of people"--and people can be prejudiced toward groups ranging from professions and religions to place of residence (e.g., city versus country) or the schools they attended (249). The most problematic forms of prejudice, however, are racial and ethnic biases. Racism is the most powerful and dangerous form of prejudice and consists of the belief that one racial type is inherently superior to another. These prejudices against people of different groups are easy enough to identify in most cases. Explaining the motivations behind racism, however, is far more difficult. Macionis supplies four principal theoretical approaches to prejudice: the scapegoat theory; the authoritarian personality theory; cultural theory; and conflict theory. But he finds that none of them gives a full and adequate account of prejudice, or has explanatory power in more than a certain percentage of cases.
The scapegoat theory proposed that prejudice develops in people who are disadvantaged themselves, and who displace their own frustration and anger onto others who are seen as holding them back, e.g., the worker who does not get a higher salary because, s/he believes, minorities' demand for jobs keeps wages low. The problem with this theory is that it does not account for the blind prejudices which see others as innately inferior. The authoritarian personality theory held that "extreme prejudice appears as a personality trait in certain individuals who hold rigidly to social norms and, seeing society as a place of extreme competition, believe that the prevalence of their group is due to their innate superiority" (250). The cultural theory, however, allows for this type of extreme prejudice in some people, but finds it too limited a phenomenon to account for the range and variety of prejudice. Cultural theory argues instead that "some prejudice is found in everyone because it...