Am I prejudiced or just stupid?

While this article (http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/does-low-intelligence-make-you-prejudiced/) claims to make a correlation between intelligence and racism, I disagree with the premise.  So we have a foul on the field:  

Prejudice, i.e. pre judging, and negative stereotyping are learned behaviors within a cultural system; in our case, the western Angle culture.  

When people spend a lot of time steeped in the culture by watching it, reading it, singing it, acting in it, and buying into the dream of it, they buy a cultural belief system that helps form their identities…just ask the Marlboro man.   Or the Vietnamese guys singing "Horse with No Name": in the movie Air America.

Or the person who patters their lifestyle on a character from a TV show or ad in some way.  We rely on these things to tell us what normal looks like in the social culture, for better or worse.   

If people of lower intelligence watch more TV or are more immersed in popular culture, then they are more susceptible to the cultural teachings that are currently popular.  

In the western world, Anglo culture is and always has been very popular.  

In some media that may be trying to change a little…as it attempted to change in the late sixties and seventies…only to be smothered by the new normal, pro-Anglophile, middle of the road, young republican culture of the eighties through today, but I digress…

Prejudice is systemic, not based on a person’s capacity to think so much as what they are given to think about, i.e., "what" they are taught to think.  It is Shakespeare, Bronte, Dickens, and King.  Not just television.  

Prejudice is a systemic cultural belief system.  

This is because "culture" is defined as "any learned behavior." 

America has an Anglo based culture, evidenced by manifest destiny and Anglo conformity in history (especially in melting pot theory).  Evidenced by the strong dose of English lit in our school curriculum, in our movies, and popular music (we called it the British invasion...but go back to Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan.,..).

The culture of Anglo conformity breeds supremacist mentalities (eugenics; slavery; calling other cultures "savage"), and ethnocentric beliefs.It is subtle and gross; it is Tarzan against the savages; it is "taking our country back" (from the people we took it from?).

According to many historic figures who studied power structures and economic systems in society, like Mill and Marx and Fromm, people in power control information; and how that information is presented.  American power has historically been in Anglo hands, or the hands of Anglo conformists:  what would they want to have taught to the masses I wonder?

Anglo power structure in America presents information and cultural beliefs in an Anglo-centric way.   It teaches people “how” to think, using media, literature, the arts, and “any learned behavior.”

Therefore racism and prejudice are cultural beliefs disseminated by people who have historically been in power, who are invested in being in power in America.  Racism and prejudice are not based on intelligence at all, but information control in soicety.

Cultural identity is the way people are taught to think of themselves and others; it is the way people are taught to form their sense of who they are as set forth by the power structure; it is the way people are shown how to relate to the world around them, by example, by story, by picture, by tradition. 

Cultural identity is the subtext of most literature, education, art, and media.   

Zinn documents the birth of western cultural racism as a part of colonial American  national identity well when he discusses early colonial America and the concept of "race" being used as a class tactic to protect the rich from the poor.

These cultural beliefs are hard to let go of because the people who benefit from information the power structure armed them with outnumber those who don't benefit.  So the become the vanguard of the cultural identity; the default protectors of the culture.  

In America this cultural identity, infused with prejudice feeds the strong belief in law and order as a justification of the cultural belief and identity system…not that law in and of itself is a bad thing.  

Anglo centric identity is taught to the point that the undeserved point of view does not exist, as it is not Anglo, and it is not represented well in literature and education; and when it is, it is a culture in need of rescuing by Anglo culture.  

The undeserved POV is allowed to be ignored by law, traditionally (as culture is transmitted) as evidenced by historic US Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy vs. Ferguson, Dredd Scott, and separate but equal and voter suppression laws.

The subtext of cultural superiority is ignored because no one wants to feel guilty about their seeming good fortune in the power structure...but the truth of things gnaws at some...

So you get extreme defensiveness at the mention of issues of racism and prejudice because it threatens some peoples very sense of identity; or makes them do the uncomfortable task of questioning from where their beliefs originated.

It is easier to believe the information the power structure puts out, and the way it is put out, because it seems like you are somehow blessed in the system; and let’s face it, in the system as is, many of you are beneficiaries of more benevolence than malevolence.

Cultural roots of racism have nothing to do with intelligence; or even how “good”or “bad” a person is; but people mistakenly think it has a lot to do with these things.  

Systemic prejudice and the belief system it teaches is born of a susceptibility to being taught 'what" to think as opposed to "how"; and an unwillingness to question who one is, and the system in which one finds oneself.   

People, of any intelligence, look at the stars on a clear night and have the equal capacity to ask these questions at least once in their lives I’m sure.

In truth, any human system would have to guard against this tendency toward majority culture conformity and supremacy: African, Asian, Native American, or Anglo.

Humility is an easy answer to the tendency toward superior cultural beliefs.  But humility and power don’t play well together. 

We need humility. 

Not the humility that the sharpers of the national culture--the meta powers tell Anglo conformists and Anglo descended people that they naturally have. That is false, and a means of control.  It leads some to believe that other cultures don't possess the positive attributes of humility they have; and feeds negative stereotyping of others.

Humility does not depend on intelligence.

But a humility born of empathy. Born of the knowledge that we are in this together, as a world culture.