A . " A Language Approach to Prejudice

T is no great revelation that if one wishes to analyze the insidious causes of racial prejudice he would do well to begin such an investi-gation by analyzing his language. For example, black things in our language are associated with sin, death, germs, dirt, and disease. The "bad guy " in our westerns wears the black hat, rides the black horse, and has a black moustache. We are all too aware of terms such as "blacklist, " "blackballed, " the Black Plague, not to mention black cats. On the other hand, the "good guy " wears a white hat, rides a white horse, and doesn't even tell "white " lies. Among the things we asso-ciate with white are purity, cleanliness, virginity, and honorable pro-fessions, as in "white-collar worker." All this is not new; it has been explored by Ossie Davis and others. But if our language is perhaps an insidious cause for the perpetuation of racism, can it not also become the vehicle which propels us out of the mire of prejudice and hatred? As a graduate student in language courses of Neil Postman and Charles Wcingartner, as a reader of S. I. Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson, and Irving J. Lee, I began to question my own prejudices. I rear-ranged my own verbal maps to fit the territory. I became convinced that no one who acted as though he believed the principles of general semantics could also pre-judge or hate others because they belonged to a certain ethnic group. So, armed with Catherine Minteer's moral support and with financial support from Harry Maynard's General Semantics Foundation, I launched the attack against the windmill and undertook to test my convictions by my doctoral research. The purpose of this study was to determine whether instruction in general semantics would reduce ethnic prejudice in high school stu-dents and to create a course of study in general semantics that would cause such a reduction of ethnic prejudice. The rationale behind the study was that prejudice is the result of a faulty cognitive proces