The Origins of Prejudice

[Danyelle] Hello everybody. Welcome to Comets Discuss, part of the UT Dallas CometCast network, where we provide discussions on big trending topics. For this series we’re talking about prejudice. While a lot is been happening in the past few weeks in regards to prejudice, racism and police brutality, this is not a short-term issue. So we’re talking with UT Dallas experts — while practicing social distancing — to provide you with various perspectives on this important topic. I’m Danyelle. Today we’re talking with Dr. Nils Roemer about prejudice. We discuss how it occurs and what we can learn from the past. Dr. Roemer is the interim dean of the School of Arts and Humanities and the director of the UT Dallas Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Roemer. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

[Dr. Roemer] Well, thank you for having me. I always see and enjoy an opportunity to talk about my work. I’m very passionate about what I do so talking about it, in particular this remote time, is a great opportunity so thank you for having me.

[Danyelle] It really is a great opportunity especially because we’re all home. To get started can you tell us a little bit about the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies and your work that you do there?

[Dr. Roemer] So just very briefly, the Holocaust Studies program is over 30 years old. It was initially begun by Holocaust survivor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth who arrived at UTD campus initially to teach literature and then because of her experience started to introduce classes on the Holocaust. Moving forward some 30 years, now it’s a large center with by now five endowed professors, dedicated library staff, and it’s a very robust academic center. So we teach a lot of undergrad and graduate students. We produce PhD students. But I think one of its other really equally important part is community engagement. So in any given year, between the different faculty that is involved in the Ackerman Center, we do about 40 to 50 events and they can be really small — you know, me just talking to some high schoolers — and then they can be us having invited, you know, wider parts of the community to watch a movie together on campus — six seven hundred people. So and anything in between. Mission is very simple: education. Education about a critical moment in the 20th century that to this day many view as a watershed that in lots of ways is unlike other historical moments insofar as it has also cast a new light even on our own time. I mean, knowing about it and and the dangers of that society kind of constantly lives on, you know, on the edges of what we otherwise cherish, I think, you know, continuously illuminates even our own present in ways that they wouldn’t be, you know, seen right now if it wouldn’t have been for that event. So it’s in lots of ways therefore unlike other histories. It’s not just something that simply happened that we memorize and then we’re good to go. It’s something that I think constantly brings us back to the big questions.

[Danyelle] Yes and later on I definitely am going to get into it about what you think we can learn from that, because like you said, it is a good parallel for our current time. But first let’s talk a little bit more about your background. So you came to the U.S. from Germany. How did your early life influence your thoughts about the world, especially your thoughts about prejudice?

[Dr. Roemer] So I was initially born in Germany — Hamburg, city up north, close to Denmark. Not giving too much away if I say that I was born in the 1960s. My parents would have been too young to have any active role in the Second World War. They were children. And so I’m then the, the next generation. But, but it’s critical to my time that I was born was in the 60s. My teachers were educated and so my teachers were more part of the rebellious generation that turned, you know, against their parents and challenged their parents quite literally across the, the breakfast table: What did you do? So what otherwise we know of the 1960s — Bob Dylan, the times are changing, Vietnam War, Germany had all of that and then some. And the “and some” was this very personal challenge between the generations. Now they became my teachers — that generation — when I went to high school. I went to high school in the 1980s when Germany experienced lots of anniversaries, 50th anniversaries — 50th anniversary of Hitler coming to power. 50th anniversary of Nuremberg Laws. And so it was something that was very very visible, you know, in a general sense and at the same time when you grew up in Germany in the ’80s, you travel a lot. So you go, you know, if you have well-meaning parents who think you should be educated, they send you to England, they send you to France, they they want you to see the world, they want you to learn languages. And that’s what my parents did. But you recognize very quickly that when you were, you know, just having great time with your friends and you were, you know, talking out loudly in German and in London or in Paris or Amsterdam and there people turn their heads. It was not, you know, comfortable for everyone and that made you realize that what you inherited, which was not your choice, but something that you inherited, just this general label being German, whatever that means, was something that was not easy, not unproblematic, but that made you very sensitive to the issue of prejudices. In the eighties and us in particularly, you know, we were very keen on thinking that we were kind of on the edge of finally turning a corner on this one. We had that confrontation of the generation of our teachers. We became the next one. We saw then in particular going into the 90s, the end of the Cold War, Germany acknowledging on a far wider scale its own guilt and responsibilities, all the way down to a personal level and so you really felt, okay, this was a moment where we could finally rethink what it meant to be German in the increasingly unifying Europe and overcome this, you know, horrible legacy of prejudices.

[Danyelle] So as you and some of the other people who work at the center have looked at anti-semitism and prejudice, where do you guys think that these thoughts originate from?

[Dr. Roemer] I think we have started to understand how in particular stereotypes and prejudices, if they’re deep seeded into the kind of foundation — new texts and traditions of a society, Christianity in this case — can have a very, very lasting life and I think you can also then kind of bring certain group dynamics into this and you can realize at any moment in a crisis there’s always a tendency— I mean look at us now. I mean how many wild conspiracy theories could the three of us name in the next five seconds? I mean this would be a long, long order, right? Everything. I mean the pandemic, you know, there are wild speculations. There’s a fair number of individuals, here and elsewhere, they believe that it was created by the Chinese. Then there are many that believe actually the Jews of course created again. Then others think it must have been Bill Gates. I mean there’s a tendency for these types of thoughts to kind of come up to the surface because they seem to provide easy answers and I think there’s something in our societies and maybe something in our psyche that gravitates always to this and that’s, you know, it gets you to the bottom of what are prejudices. Are they, you know, things that we acquire? Or are they things that we inherit? And I think the challenge of understanding them is probably that it’s a little bit of both — that there’s a certain element of prejudices that we inherit — and I don’t mean inherit in terms of our DNA, I’m not going that far — but inherent and are given without us even being aware of them. And then there are others that we are acquiring and I think that’s what makes it also so challenging to confront them. That many individuals hold prejudices even though they themselves would always staunchly oppose the idea that they’re prejudicial. They would think of themselves as very liberal, open-minded and in many ways they might be, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot also at the same time share certain prejudices and I think that’s the difficulty for us in understanding this. What are we dealing with? Are we, when we think you have a prejudice, then we think, is that something that you think? Well it’s not quite only something that you think. That thought has a fairly strong emotional core with you, right? You identify that thought with a fairly strong emotional feeling. That’s why it’s a prejudice. So much so that you may or may not be willing to act upon. When the moment you act upon, then we think it’s not any longer that you have just a prejudice — you’re discriminating. It’s this odd mixture, I think, that we for too long have thought that having a prejudice it’s like having green socks on. You know you can be normal in many other ways but you just happen to have these weird views and I think at this point we start to understand, no no, you can’t disaggregate a human being like that. It’s part of their respective worldview into which these ideas are integrated and where, depending on the context, the societies in which we live, someone, you know, if you go back to my historical example, expertise — the Third Reich, they did a hell of a job in enforcing these stereotypes through education and propaganda and you know our societies do this in other ways where we spread, unfortunately, not just education like we’d like to do in the School of the Arts and Humanities or on campus or in the Ackerman Center. But not everyone has signed up to that goal of educating. Lots of other individuals are signed up to a slightly different goal and we see this very much now I think because our societies here, now and elsewhere confronted with lots of challenges — social, economic, the pandemic, whatever else you want to pile on to this — and that makes people uneasy and fearful.

[Danyelle] So do you think that some of these circumstances for our present day that you were talking about — like that fear, the socio-economical, financial and personal fear — is what leads to prejudice becoming systemic in a society? Or is there something else at play that makes prejudice become systemic?

[Dr. Roemer] Alone the word “systemic” — I mean nowadays it’s almost standard vocabulary. All of a sudden everyone talks about racism being systemic and rightly so. 15 years ago we would have all, you know, look for our dictionaries and thought like what does that actually mean, right? So that shows you a little bit of how our conversation has changed. I think the tensions that our societies are experiencing, here in the US or Europe, clearly have something to do with it. We are starting to realize that we are now in a society that produces a social inequality of proportions that our parents, you know, would have been incapable of, of you know, even thinking about. They were thinking, well this was the pursuit of happiness, right, for all and each one of us clearly has something to do with it. But I think when we talk about systemic we have to realize that what that means is that— and the Nazis were very good at it and they would, you know, show you for example an image of a family, you know, and they, all the family look nice and happy, content. And they would make you thereby identify with something which you identify with, you know, maybe traditional family values or whatever, and then you would however see how that innocent image in and of itself would also have the outsider placed right on the fringes of that family. In other words you would think and identify yourself not just simply with the anti-semitic message but you would all the sudden code the ideal of beauty, of ideal family, as being in opposition to that and I think we have seen a lot of that in our society these days that, you know, we could, like, you know, talk about where we like to eat, what we like to wear, and then you would say well, they really make the best food or I would say the shoes are the best or whatever. But a lot of this has come to us in very complex stories through advertisement. They never just show us the shoes, they never just show us the plates. They show us embedded communities, consumers, with whom we identify or not, and why do we identify with them? Why do we like them? Maybe because they’re like us, right? So does that mean that all the sudden we form associations between what we like and our kind of ethnic identity? I think yes. I think we do a lot of that and that’s what we call systemic. That it’s virtually everywhere. It’s embedded into the social-economic inequality, it’s embedded in the inaccessibility of higher education, or uneven accessibility of education, but also in many of these other comparatively innocent views of sorts where we however I think have ideals that are never quite away from the thing that they exclude.

[Danyelle] On the subject of systemic prejudice, what would you describe what we’ve been experiencing in the United States? Would you describe it as systemic prejudice? Would you describe it as something else?

[Dr. Roemer] Well, you know, I think again if you don’t mind, I’ll play this through my own biography a little bit. Growing up in Germany — that’s where we had started out — I had a very clear sense growing up in the 80s of America being very different. You know Germany was very, very much in a nation state still. Most of the people that I interacted with there were a little bit like I was and I remember when I was visiting for the first time in the United States, that I was kind of thinking, wow, this is a very different world. A very different, more inclusive, more diverse, and this was the kind of European perspective. And when I came to the United States in the 1990s to study at Columbia University I literally felt that I had left all of that behind. All that nationalism, all those tensions, and that America was different. And I think a lot of us had that, you know, view of the United States. I was not the only one. I think part of what is so disheartening for all of us now to realize that there was a view that suited us in lots of ways and kind of consoled us and in a certain ideal while all along the reality was not like that for everyone and I think that’s what we see right now in this kind of outburst of anger and frustration that results in daily demonstrations now going on where people rightly call in and say, no! The real United States might have been like that for you, or you, or you, but not for me. And we have to recognize that if it’s not like that for all of us then it’s not. You go to these demonstrations, you’re like surrounded by sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who have organized these things and I think they’re just tired of it because they’ve grew up in a very different reality because their schools are fairly diverse and they’re tired of it. They don’t want this luggage, baggage of their parents and grandparents any longer. They truly are calling in now. I think it’s time for us to own up to our ideals and to make them happen and I think so much more so on campus. I mean this is our business. Our business is the business of creating opportunities and futures for our students. Not to limit them by, you know, segregating them into different groups. I arrived at UT Dallas in 2006. This is the part that I’ve enjoyed most. That there’s no way of predicting any longer who I teach, where they come from. I have to be ready to make what I teach relevant to students who possibly come from different continents, possibly of different religious backgrounds, possibly have, you know, different social classes, you know, in terms of their own standing. That’s what makes it exciting. We kind of have to — in this difficult remote moment of our existence — hold on to this one and believe that we just created this environment on campus. There are lots of us. In any given moment there are 30,000 Comets, plus staffs, faculty. They’ll be having important roles in society. So I think we have an opportunity but therefore also an obligation to do it. I think we realized now that it’s time. We can’t just simply believe, yes, you know, these ideals of our Constitution are there and no, it’s time right now really to call in what is real and what is not real and I think a lot of places do this. You know I live up in Frisco and I just realized the Frisco Police, you know, happily now communicated with the public in terms of their procedures and they don’t want to be the police any longer that is constantly in the news. They want for themselves be someone else. They want to call it in and say, we have a moment here. We have an opportunity. We want to change and so do we. All of us, I think. If you go back to what you can ultimately learn from all of this — I’m a historian and so I gonna tell you things have not always existed. They’ve come into existence, democracy being one of them. And if we really feel that this is something that was cherish, then we have to work on it and make it last because just as it could come into existence it can also fade out. I think that’s, you know, the lesson that we can draw, and that in many ways, lots of us think always, so what can I do? So what is the most important thing the German Jews learned right almost the day after Hitler came to power? The one thing that they learned the day after Hitler came to power is that, that they could not be certain any longer who their friends were and who their enemies were. Why? Because potential friends didn’t make it obvious where they were lining up and silence became very quickly complicity and thereby Jews very quickly felt more isolated than they in reality might have been. But they very quickly become isolated because for them, anybody who didn’t overtly indicated what they stood for, then it’s all the same. If you’re quiet, if you’re silent — for the person who is persecuted you just look like the others. There’s no way to differentiate between the, the silent participants and the active participants.

[Danyelle] You talked a little bit about our campus and having, like, a really multicultural experience here, multi-ethnic experience here, and I think that that’s beautiful. That’s one of the things I love about UTD. What opportunities does our university have to relate to our community — our campus community, our Comet community — and then also society as a whole?

[Dr. Roemer] Well I think that’s really where the big opportunity is. So there are lots of opportunities but the real big one is that in many ways our students, if we get them excited and thinking about our issues, then they are, so to speak, our bridge heads into the community. Because we virtually have everyone on campus right? So we can all the sudden via our students reach into these communities and, and affect them as well. But we also have to be, I think, more proactive in welcoming them. For me at the Ackerman Center, it’s always been nice quote-unquote to engage with the community. But if we honestly think about what is the community? It’s very abstract right? So have we always engaged with the community. We’re always engaged certain parts probably more than others and, and I think that’s where we have to work now and we have to work a little harder to kind of cross, you know, over into those communities and say, we have events, we want you, you know, to be part of it. And to engage them as well and that’s, you know, in lots of ways what I feel always that I’ve been given a great opportunity in my two roles — that Holocaust is recognized virtually by everyone — no matter what your community is— as a historical, in a significant moment. Therefore people come from all kind of walks of lives. And then in my other capacity as interim dean of the School of the Arts and Humanities we do philosophy, we do dance, we do music. Very universal things. There’s not anybody who, you know, is not interested in any other these things. And the communities don’t break along predictable lines of those. People who are interested in dance and music or whatever it is. So I think there’s a great opportunity for us really to go via our students into those communities and, and also to call in the other part of our promise and that is a very simple one. It’s in our name. We are the University of Texas in Dallas. We are a campus in an urban center and we want to be in that urban center and we want to, you know, if you lately look at what President Benson has put out, there’s more and more emphasis on understanding our respective role in this city. From an economical perspective, educational perspective. But then I would add on also, you know, from my perspective as educators when it comes to these issues of inclusion and exclusion, prejudices, stereotypes and discrimination.

[Danyelle] Was there anything that you haven’t mentioned so far that you think people today can learn from the Holocaust?

[Dr. Roemer] The biggest sense that, you know, thing that we can learn from the Holocaust is that I think the Holocaust — or the coming of the Third Reich to power — was a dramatic change and it was one that could not be foreseen, could not be anticipated, but happened and that we respectively live now at a time where I think we don’t know what tomorrow brings, right? We don’t know whether we are at the beginning of a story or at the end or middle or whatever. And if you really fully appreciate that then it, you know, makes you realize that we have a tremendous obligation. We have an obligation to make sure that tomorrow is more like the one that we want because otherwise we might become part of a narrative that ends up somewhere where we don’t want to be. One, you know, one of the kind of interesting lines that lately I picked up which I, you know, it still is in my mind, is maybe again because I have children, but it’s simply the question, is our generation, will we deem ourselves to be good ancestors? Meaning, will the next generation look back at us and say they’ve done the right thing? They recognized finally that their environment needed our attention. They recognized that equal access to education is important. They recognized that we had enough of prejudices. And you know I think unfortunately the judge is still out for that one, whether we will be those good ancestors.

[Danyelle] That’s a really good way to hold an entire generation accountable. What is the legacy you want left behind? Do you want people to look back on you the way that we look back on, you know, even like the Jim Crow South era, or yeah, you know, the Holocaust era? So Dr. Roemer, do you have one final thought for our audience? Like if you could teach one thing to the entire world, what would you want everyone to know?

[Dr. Roemer] I think these days the thing that I most often want to like teach everyone is how to actually make good judgments on the, you know, how to evaluate actually what we call reality, I think this is something that, you know, nowadays has become more and more difficult. That in lots of ways you and I we may or may not agree on certain things but the fact that we may presuppose or base ourselves on entirely different realities, you know, that I think is really, really troubling. And I think that brings us back to the classroom. This is what we teach our students — how to evaluate, how to assess, how to criticize, how to make sense out of incomplete bits of a reality. And I think that’s really an ability that we have to hone in right now because right now, again, unfortunately, we are not doing such a good job and we are not just increasingly disagreeing about our conclusions, but we already disagreeing whether the sun is shining or not.

[Danyelle] Thank you so much again for taking the time and giving us this knowledge and insight on how we can look at some of the origins of prejudice and how we can fight to be good ancestors. We really appreciate all of your information.

[Dr. Roemer] Thank you again for having me.

[Danylle] You can learn more about the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies and the events they host at utdallas.edu/ackerman. You can also learn about what’s happening at the School of Arts and Humanities at utdallas.edu/ah. We’ll include these links in the show notes. Thanks for joining us. Comets Discuss is brought to you by the UT Dallas Office of Communications. A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to check out our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. For the most up-to-date news at UT Dallas, visit the university’s News Center page at utdallas.edu/news. Take care of yourselves, Comets.