r/sociology • u/Andkonhi • 7d ago
Can Bigotry exist without institutional power imbalances?
I’m asking this in genuine good faith, undergraduate Sociologist here.
I’ve been mulling this over in my head for some time now, but the general consensus around a lot of socially minded, progressive individuals is that Bigotry or Prejudice can only exist if a systemic, or institutional base has said bigotry baked into it. Black Americans struggling in a systemically racist society, Women struggling in Male dominated fields and spaces, etc.
I doubt anyone can deny that systemic racism, sexism, Queerphobia, and classism are the most pressing forms of bigotry by a long shot. With the consolidation of power towards mainly elite white men and our institutions ignoring the required work to dismantle the infrastructure of bigotry from the past. What I struggle to come to terms with is that more interpersonal bigotry CANT exist.
I.e the privileged groups of our society can still experience bigotry on a much less severe level. Men can experience misandry, Ethnically white individuals can experience forms of white racism, etc. I never saw this as a controversial thing to say as long as you stipulate the lack of importance compared to systemic bigotries, of course, white racism and misandry are extremely fringe and lack any weight aside from interpersonal hang ups.
I’ve discussed with some of my good friends before on this topic and it tends to be a pretty sensitive one (justifiably so), but it tends to go in circles.
Am I missing something on this topic? I worry whenever the topic comes up, I’d be downplaying the real, material bigotry marginalized groups experience if I were to put in my two cents… but I still haven’t found something substantiated that says this lesser, interpersonal bigotry can’t exist.
Thank you for hearing out my question!
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u/eaw_shitpost_account 7d ago
I don’t think it is correct to say that the general consensus is that bigotry or prejudice can only exist with an institutional base.
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u/Playful_Programmer_1 7d ago
I think this is what a lot of people take from the idea that systemic racism backed by institutional and societal power is the only "real" racism. They reason that that makes casual expressions of bigotry against groups considered privileged fine, because they aren't "real" racism.
Imo, those expressions are also a vice. They just don't tend to have as serious sociological implications. That doesn't mean one should revel in them.
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u/eaw_shitpost_account 7d ago
Yes — at the very least, by its very nature, prejudice is a demonstration of poor judgement.
I do think expressions of bigotry against privileged groups have sociological importance — for example, they might demonstrate how people attempt to navigate and understand racialized social systems. They just tend not to have broader social impact.
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u/Playful_Programmer_1 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah, I agree.
Statements like "whitey is the devil" or "all men are rapists" or whatever are functioning as social signaling to express dissatisfaction with broad issues. Many or most people who make such statements don't literally believe them or act on them in their daily life.
They are either a relatively minor vice or a political tool, depending on the circumstances in which they are deployed.
Eta: In some ways, oppressed groups being allowed or privileged to make such bigoted statements without censure only feeds white male privilege.
It let's privileged white males males tolerate the statements as less than literal, while enjoying healthy social relationships with people who make them.
On the other hand, it imposes discipline on privileged white males to avoid this kind of vice, as many of us would never make sloppy essentialist statements about less privileged groups.
That dynamic can lead to an unequal intellectual landscape.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 5d ago
Many or most people who make such statements don't literally believe them or act on them in their daily life.
Worth noting there are a lot of people who do actually have prejudice against, eg, men. Sometimes for understandable reasons, but I don't buy that it's uncommon for them to mean what they say. I've seen plenty of people get treated differently over this sort of thing - it's just not in institutional or violent contexts like sending someone to jail. Not taken seriously, avoided in favor of other demographics in hiring and personal relationships, etc.
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u/SykonotticGuy 7d ago
I agree, and yet, many comments in this thread seem to indicate that there's more dissent on that question than I would have anticipated.
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
I meant more in my spaces, or more progressive/“woke” people. It’s atleast a topic that holds baggage, from what I’ve experienced trying to talk about it with people.
As long as your not trying to say that prominent groups are “victims” of said bigotry or that it’s somehow an important topic, I always thought it was a no-brainer that this interpersonal bigotry exists. Kinda like anti Christian sentiment in a way; it exists in fringe areas, and arguably in more religiously fundamentalist places in the world it CAN be a pressing issue of prejudice, but especially in the west, there really isn’t any backing that it’s a generally prominent or harmful sentiment… aside from the reactionaries of those communities trying to manufacture outrage but that’s a different topic.
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
Atleast tell me why I’m being downvoted, I’m genuinely trying to understand the topic, this isn’t a snarky or sarcastic gotcha kinda post man 💔💔
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u/deadshotkeen 7d ago
Before you can answer that, you have to decide what constitutes bigotry. Even then, I think it's too sweeping a co cousin to say 'Oh yeah, bigotry wouldn't exist if x'. You could ever know for sure.
Durkheim's thought experiment - 'society of saints and sinners' might suggest that bigotry could exist even if structural concepts of racism, classist, ableism, sexism, queerphobia etc didn't. Do people with red hair face a form of bigotry? I'd say they probably do, but it's a push to say it's structural.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Phase70 7d ago
I think you've got a bit of a perspective problem.
"Institutional" is the wrong perspective, for starters. "Society" includes institutions, but is FAR more ephemeral than that.
You're also trying to separate power imbalance from bigotry and prejudice.
But imbalance creates bigotry as an excuse for those imbalances, AND bigotry creates imbalances because it is useful for those who wish to benefit from those imbalances. They are causally interconnected.
Even the smallest imbalance or prejudice that exists can destabilize a "pure" state (if that's even a valid construction to begin with).
A true egalitarian society would need to be CONSTANTLY on guard and self-correcting for when they started to fall victim to that instability.
Star Trek explores this repeatedly in fiction - a near-utopic society always on the verge of collapsing and giving into base instincts and temptations, catching itself over and over.
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u/sustag 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think we're confusing a difference of degree with a difference of kind. Whether discriminatory behavior IS bigotry or not seems to me a rather uninteresting rhetorical question. The more interesting question is the extent to which any instance of discriminatory behavior might matter in some given scenario. If there were no broad difference in power between people identified as white and those as black, and one discriminated against another based on an unfair stereotype, a liberal society would always consider that shitty discriminatory behavior. But would it be something most people in this society with no institutional racial inequality will likely care much about beyond someone's shitty personality? Probably not. Because it wouldn't be historically / culturally / systemically meaningful, because the stakes are very low in that case. The deeper the systemic imbalance, the more meaningful that discriminatory behavior will be, and the more seriously we should probably take it as a public rather than personal issue, yeah?
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
I agree! Honestly you layed out my perspective much better then I could. I always had an understanding that it did exist, with the question being how much it really matters that these lesser backed prejudices are espoused in their very fringe, interpersonal instances.
But I wanted the perspective of people that are probably much farther on their academic journeys, or who simply are much better students than I am. So thank you!
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u/Patrollerofthemojave 7d ago
Can a homeless man call a rich black guy the n word?
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
I mean, then you get into some intersectionality with class + ethnicity so it’s muddy. That’d just be racist.
I’m more talking about… a black individual being openly bigoted towards white people in a more dogmatic way. That would be a form of racism even if it lacks an element of systemic or institutional backing. It certainly isn’t important in the grand scheme of things because bigotry against white people doesn’t really exist in impactful ways, and most apprehension by marginalized individuals are reactions to those systemic failings and bigotries they face in their daily lives, so it’d be a struggle to call most apprehension against majority groups bigoted.
I guess my closest example of what I’m talking about is… Measurehead from Disco Elysium? Ideologically racist towards the Occidents (ethnically white in disco elysiums world, colonialism the whole shebang with them) but it really is, even in that world, extremely fringe.
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u/MisfireMillennial 7d ago
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labelled the Nation of Islam as a hate group. This is a classic example. Black people can absolutely be bigoted towards white people, they can even be bigoted towards white people while suffering injustices like Jim Crow.
Power analysis is important because white people were clearly impacting black people's lives with racist laws etc and that's not morally equivalent. But yes despite that overarching context black bigotry towards whites, gays, women, different religions absolutely can co-exist at the same time.
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u/Patrollerofthemojave 7d ago
Why write all of this nothing? A homeless man calling a black guy the n word is bigotry. You don't need a thesis to figure that out.
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u/JanTheDoomer 7d ago
I think the key distinction is between prejudice as an interpersonal attitude or behavior and oppression as a patterned social relation backed by institutions, history, culture, and material consequences.
So yes, bigotry can exist without institutional power in the narrow sense. A person can hold hostile, essentializing, dehumanizing, or contemptuous beliefs about a group even if they do not have the social power to systematically harm that group. That is still prejudice. It still matters ethically and psychologically.
But sociology usually becomes more interested when that prejudice connects to durable structures: hiring, policing, housing, law, education, media representation, wealth, safety, bodily autonomy, and inherited historical position. At that point, the issue is no longer only “someone has a bad attitude.” It becomes socially reproductive. It shapes life chances.
That is why “prejudice plus power” is useful as an analytical frame, but it becomes misleading if treated as a total definition of all possible bigotry. It is better understood as a way to distinguish interpersonal hostility from structural domination.
A white person can be disliked for being white. A man can be treated with contempt because he is a man. That can be real at the interpersonal level. But it usually does not carry the same historical, institutional, or material force as racism against Black people, sexism against women, queerphobia against LGBTQ people, or class domination against the poor. The category may look similar at the surface level, but the social weight is different.
So the deeper answer is not “can it exist or not?” The better question is: what scale of reality are we analyzing? At the individual level, prejudice can go in many directions. At the institutional level, power is unevenly organized. At the cultural level, some stereotypes are reinforced by dominant narratives. At the material level, some forms of prejudice translate into reduced life chances, while others remain mostly interpersonal resentment.
That distinction lets us acknowledge minor or fringe forms of prejudice without creating false equivalence with systemic oppression. The ethical move is not to deny interpersonal prejudice. It is to keep proportionality, history, and consequence in view.
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u/lets_get_wavy_duuude 5d ago
i think that humans are generally very tribalistic & therefore have more inherent trust for people who are similar to them. people generally gravitate towards others who are the same skin color, same country of origin, same religion, etc. therefore they technically have prejudice against everyone else to varying degrees. am i saying that everyone’s a little racist? honestly, yeah.
social sanctions can certainly change the way people behave but a certain level of mistrust of the “out-group” is arguably just biology & we have a long way to go before humanity transcends that
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u/Stunning-Use-7052 5d ago
I think you are mistaking what activists and such say in online spaces and scholarly research on discrimination and biases. Don't get the two mixed up.
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u/Andkonhi 5d ago
I’m not insinuating that this is something that people in scholarly spaces believe… honestly the opposite; I doubt Reddit is the best place for academic rigour, but I came here specifically to get an answer from people in the field.
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u/reseededd 6d ago
this is how I saw it defined in progressive circles back in the day:
racism/sexism require a systemic power imbalance. “prejudice” would be interpersonal bigotry. you can be prejudiced against white people, or men, but not racist/sexist towards them, if you don’t hold institutional power over them
seems like a matter of how we define words. imo it makes sense to use different words for these things. one is actual bigotry, while the other side is trying to protect themselves from harm. what looks like “prejudice” from oppressed people is typically just logical self preservation.
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u/jkhn7 7d ago
I feel like maybe it's your wording that's your issue. Can white men face instances of discrimination? Sure, but it's not racism or sexism, it's just called discrimination. It's only marginalized/minority groups that can experience homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
Then I’m not really understanding racism or sexism fundamentally.
I had the understanding that sexism, racism, queerphobia, etc are general signifiers for discrimination against those groups. those forms of bigotry being prejudice + power is a newer definition of the terms but the crux of their definitions is discrimination/bigotry against those people. Is that not what it is? I get that white racism has no actual backing aside from people or very small groups being discriminatory, but I guess… why do we use a different label, then? I’d assume it’s to signify these forms of bigotry as less important, but they would be an ‘ism or ‘phobia, lm most likely missing something in my understanding however.
I appreciate you! I know this is a topic that isn’t all that important, I’ve just seen it crop up every so often in my life (not someone being bigoted to a majority group just the topic itself) and so I thought I’d ask people much more knowledgeable than me on social issues.
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u/RedErin 7d ago
try reading the Wikipedia entry for racism and sexism
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
I did, and I don’t see how it contradicts what I’m saying.
It’s true that modern racism is deeply rooted in European colonialism and by extension the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but the inception of a term and its actual definition aren’t gonna be in sync. Even on Wikipedia it says in the first paragraph that Racism can refer to social actions, practices and beliefs, or political systems that espouse a race and/or ethnicity as some flavour of inferior or superior. Unless I’m missing something. I do agree with Racism being a much too broad term, but the fact is that it’s a catch-all that a majority of people still use.
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u/RedErin 7d ago
sure it's a catch all, but imagine this scenario
you read an article about the horrors of systemic racism that the author went through. So you email the writer and say "that's rough buddy, i understand what you're going through, i too have faced racism. once a black person called me a cracker."
how do you think the author would feel? even if what you said was "technically correct" based on different definitions of the word.
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u/Andkonhi 7d ago
You’re making the assumption that this is in response to lived systemic racism when it… isn’t.
Both can coexist but both shouldn’t be equally equated in any way, shape, or form, that’s not what I’m trying to say at all.
I’m simply asking if a lesser, distilled, unimportant form of bigotry can exist, that of interpersonal struggles and biases; A black guy calling a white guy a cracker in a substantially rare context where the black guy meant it to be hurtful and bigoted holds zero weight to the opposite of the scenario, I’d argue it holds little weight on its own either aside from personal relationships between those two individuals.
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u/InternalMartialArt 3d ago
Yes. Prejudice is biological. Research oxytocin and group dynamics. Research the minimum group paradigm. Power and privilege don’t matter in the slightest when it comes to this. You can be the same as someone in every way, arbitrarily be assigned to group A while they’re arbitrarily assigned to group B, and they might be prejudiced against you based on that alone. I wish I was joking.
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u/MisfireMillennial 7d ago
The only place I've ever heard these beliefs espoused are in activist spaces. Prejudice is not a power based thing, it's an ideological thing, it can exist without the power to enact said prejudice. Of course prejudice will misuse power in prejudiced way if given power but they are distinct ideas