cartoon: immovable prejudice

Get a fine art print of this cartoon.

This week’s Illustration Friday theme is “immovable”. I thought, “What is the most immovable thing in the world?” I immediately thought of prejudice. Hence the cartoon.

Wikipedia says that prejudice is a prejudgment: i.e., an assumption made about someone or something before having adequate knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy. It includes unreasonable attitudes or a priori beliefs that are unusually resistant to rational influence.

The problem with prejudice is that the one who is prejudiced usually doesn’t know it. He thinks he already has all the information needed to have the attitude or belief. So the trick that prejudice plays in the mind is: rather than knowledge leading to the attitude or belief, the attitude or belief pre-exists and forms the so-called “facts” that shape the prejudice and fuel it into action. It is a vicious circle rotating around the axis of illusion which always gains momentum. Prejudice, as in this cartoon, lodges in the mind and pretends to be informed knowledge.

How do I move the immovable in my own mind? The secret of prejudice’s power of immovability is my blindness to it, my ignorance of it. So the first thing I have to do is see this thing called prejudice in my mind, or at least see that it is possibly there. Once this is admitted as possible, once it is acknowledged and even seen, then the prejudice begins to lose its power.

But this is most difficult because it may mean that those attitudes we relish, those facts we hold fast, those beliefs we hold to be true, may all be false.

Get fine art prints of my cartoons.
Get my fine art.
Get my t-shirts.

Please join my newsletter.