The Blame Game : Prejudice is alive and well, and feeding our need for a scapegoat. On this day of thanksgiving, we search for answers to this vexing riddle.

Enter the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles and you step up to one of two doors, one marked “prejudiced,” the other “not prejudiced.” Only the “prejudiced” door opens, however.

“Prejudice is part of the human condition,” explains director Gerry Margolis. “The museum is a call for us to examine ourselves.”

Key elements of prejudice include the psychological, economic and social benefits we believe we reap. If prejudice had no rewards, prejudicial attitudes would die.

“We hide in mythologies about others because it makes life simpler,” says Margolis, who is Jewish. “Subscribing to a prejudice means ‘I don’t have to think as much.’ A prejudiced outlook gives you easy answers.”

Unfortunately, those answers are often based on false assumptions. Thus, individuals motivated by prejudice often end up on a quest for a “perfect” world that never existed. In Biblical times, tribes projected their hatreds onto a scapegoat they then sacrificed, collectively “cleansing” their souls. But old “solutions” no longer work. Instead, Margolis says, humankind has reached a crossroads.

“We cannot continue carrying this baggage, or we will destroy ourselves. We must learn to effectively deal with prejudice.”

Following the museum’s lead, The Times interviewed seven Southland leaders and presents their thoughts as a jump-off point in the search for answers.

MARCIA CHOO

‘To some extent everyone . . .is claiming victimhood.’

Marcia Choo, the Korean American director of the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center, speaks flawless, unaccented English, so phone callers often mistake her for “white,” giving her a firsthand window on prejudicial thinking.

“Being prejudiced has definite benefits,” Choo says. “The prejudiced person feels superior to another. This is particularly appealing during an economic downturn when people are feeling threatened” in their quest for jobs.

Instead of dealing with the downturn’s reality, “They look for a scapegoat, blaming someone else so they don’t have to accept responsibility for their own situation.

“They say, ‘It’s not my fault. It’s those other, different people who are to blame for my being out of a job, or for my having to wait so long in the emergency room.’ ”

By buying into prejudice, Choo says, “They don’t feel compelled to do anything.” Instead of acquiring new job skills or paying more taxes to build another hospital, they play the blame game, thus denying personal responsibility.

So profitable has the blame game become that it pervades our national discourse. “To some extent everyone, including our political leaders, is claiming victimhood.” By playing the blame game, “They don’t have to allocate resources to fight the problems. They can neglect our inner cities and absolve themselves of responsibility for taking actions to improve society.

“It’s like going home and kicking the dog: You vent your frustrations but don’t solve the problem.”

Similarly, many demonize the poor, the vulnerable, and those who are different or lacking in power, she says.

“I also get people on the phone saying, ‘Just between you and me, those Koreans deserved to be burned out.’ I’m a total stranger, and they feel comfortable expressing this. I try to keep them talking. But it scares me,” she says.

JOE HICKS

‘We aren’t born prejudiced. Rather, it’s something which has been conditioned into us. . . . ‘

Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Los Angeles chapter, differentiates prejudice from self-pride. Self-pride “gives one a sense of history, of heritage,” he says. Prejudice seeks to build self-esteem by negating others.

Prejudiced thinking abounds among those “involved in dogmatic belief systems that claim, ‘If you don’t believe as I do, you are condemned.’ ” Condemning others allows these people to think of themselves as superior, even righteous.

The problem lies not in the religion. Thus, SCLC founder Martin Luther King Jr. used religion as a force for equality.

Rather, Hicks says, the problem for many fundamentalists is that their dramatic thinking “magnetically pulls in many prejudiced people.” The teaching is then distorted to emphasize outside agendas.

Until recently, one Christian sect taught that blacks are so colored because they are “cursed by God” and are thus condemned to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” As this teaching increasingly came under fire, it was abandoned--only to have homosexual “sin” take its place, he says.

In either case, the benefit is similar. The prejudiced individual believes his alleged superiority proves a “special connection” to God. Abandoning prejudice reduces him to a mere equal, an often intolerable situation.

But “minorities can be just as intolerant as majority groups,” he says. In Rwanda, “If you stood the people together, you could not tell them apart on the basis of skin coloration. Yet they are killing each other over tribal differences.

“We aren’t born prejudiced. Rather, it’s something which has been conditioned into us through power struggles and religious conflicts,” he says.

Humankind’s best hope is that “Technology is forcing us together. We are marrying into each other’s gene pools, and science has shown that race has no validity, biologically or otherwise. Pure ethnic categories no longer exist.”

THE REV. LOU SHELDON

‘As long as you’ve got the human race, you’re going to have people hurting people.’

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, Orange County head of the Traditional Values Coalition and a fundamentalist leader, calls prejudice “a spiritual problem. It is a sense that a race or sex is inferior to another.

“Prejudiced individuals develop dislikes based not on reality, but on perception. They [then] get locked into that perception because of their community’s consensus.”

Prejudice allows for “couch potatoism. The prejudiced person can put in less effort and not really seek the truth. . . .”

Prejudiced people are often “emotionally and mentally unstable,” he says. “Their prejudiced view becomes a mission,” such as Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews he held responsible for Germany’s downfall in the 1930s.

“It’s easy to project fault, but it doesn’t solve the problem,” he says.

Prejudice stems from an individual’s having “an unresolved hurt or frustration. They’re looking for the sacrificial lamb. . . . But if they find God, they are healed of their sin of prejudice.”

Such sin includes sexism, which “temporarily soothes your male ego. It makes you feel that you are stronger, the head of a tribe. The reality is that good feeling wears off soon.”

Sheldon sees no end to prejudice: “As long as you’ve got the human race, you’re going to have people hurting people.”

LORRI L. JEAN

‘The base of almost every significant problem we deal with is lack of self-esteem.’

Lorri L. Jean, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, believes that sexism and homophobia both begin as psychological defenses.

Prejudiced men who feel inferior to other men nevertheless perceive themselves as superior to women and gays, she says. Sexism served a similar purpose from ancient times. Whereas male slaves did physical labor, female slaves were expected to render both physical labor and sexual services.

“Slave women had an incredibly different experience, with significant extra burdens,” she says.

Sexist beliefs evolved to where women stayed at home while men went out to work, earning the money--and keeping the power. During World Wars I and II, the military drafted males, and the Katharine Hepburn model for the strong, independent woman partner suddenly came into vogue. After the wars, however, male ego needs reasserted themselves--and are still reflected in “glass ceilings” on working women, she says.

Men who tend toward sexism, “the disdain and sometimes even hatred” of the feminine--also tend toward homophobia, she says. “If we somehow got rid of sexism, we would also largely get rid of homophobia.”

Homophobia is also pervasive among those who act on homosexual impulses, then distance themselves from gays.

“The base of almost every significant problem we deal with [at the center] is lack of self-esteem,” Jean says. Clients “often believe that if others don’t perceive them as gay, they won’t be discriminated against. Or they think they are less bad because at least they outwardly renounce gays.”

MANUEL GUILLOT

‘To be a true human being in a profound sense, you have to embrace all humanity. . . .’

Manuel Guillot, vice president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says many seeking political or economic gain deliberately exploit racially divisive issues. To deflect attention from difficult economic issues, many politicians have supported proposed laws targeting Latinos, he says.

Prejudice is fueled by historical perceptions. Thus, “a child does not discriminate because he does not have a historical context. He only sees what is.”

Adults, however, look back to when Latinos had little opportunity and were thus confined largely to society’s lower rungs. Invalid perceptions from those times often persist, he says.

Those views become especially dangerous when they fade from consciousness--but nevertheless affect people’s thinking. Thus, he says, many Americans subconsciously believe that Latinos “are not as competent or professional as whites”--without realizing where that view came from.

Although those who exploit prejudice may accrue short-term benefits, there is no long-term gain. “Any human being who doesn’t realize the full human integrity of the other loses out spiritually.

“To be a true human being in a profound sense, you have to embrace all humanity or you have limited your ability to grow. . . . A society split into warring ethnic camps will lack social harmony, with our children becoming our ultimate victims.”

Prejudice affects not only how the majority deals with a minority, it also hurts the minority’s self-esteem, he says. In the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education, which led to integration of the nation’s schools, attorneys placed black and white dolls before black children. Asked which dolls were prettier, the children chose the white dolls.

Thus, he says, prejudice results in pressure for the minority to emulate the majority’s look and style. In so doing, however, the minority individual “loses the essence of who he is. He becomes a phantom, a bad copy of the people perpetuating the racism.”

As America ages, young Latino, black and Asian workers will make up more of the population--and will increasingly be called upon to care for the aging majority. If racial barriers continue, strife will arise and the country will falter, he says.

SALAM AL-MARAYATI

‘[Islam’s] still promoted as a foreign evil.’

Salam Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, says prejudiced individuals seek a sense of supremacy. The initial widespread belief that the Oklahoma City bombing had originated in the Middle East “exposed the presumption that evil in the Middle East is somehow worse than evil in the [American] Midwest.” And yet, he points out, the murder rate among Americans is among the highest in the world.

Although Islam came here in the 1600s aboard slave ships, “It’s still promoted as a foreign evil,” he says. This foreign religion idea has been promoted by counterterrorism experts and political leaders seeking to cash in on an alleged “holy war in America syndrome,” thus projecting evil outside American shores.

RON WAKABAYASHI

‘We need to go beyond removing barriers between ethnic groups. . . . ‘

Ron Wakabayashi, executive director of the county Human Relations Commission and a Japanese American, believes that prejudice often masks economic differences between ethnic groups. Thus, merely resolving perceptions often doesn’t get to the core problem.

The black-Korean conflict, for example, “is better understood as a conflict between small business people operating in a high crime area.”

At its peak, 700 Korean stores operating in South-Central were the targets of 40 shootings a year. The merchants were understandably wary of their customers. The Korean papers kept a running count on the number of shootings, while the black media focused on the hostility of Korean merchants.

The issue, Wakabayashi says, was primarily economic. The media, however, often defined the problems in shorthand terms of race.

Similarly, competing economic interests are at the heart of the black-Latino conflict along the Alameda corridor. Just more than 20 years ago, a high percentage of African Americans had jobs in corridor factories, using their incomes to buy homes and leave the area.

As the factories closed, light and service industries came in, and African Americans were seemingly replaced by Latino workers. But the core issue, he says, is that the old, higher-paying jobs no longer exist.

The new industries often have no personnel departments. Instead, employees in a single shop often all come from the same Latin American village. Blacks perceive this as discrimination; Latinos perceive it as hiring people they know. The conflict then racializes and is thus reported, he says.

Venice’s Oakwood area similarly “is an area with high unemployment. Drug trafficking becomes an important way for many people to survive,” he says.

The influx of Latinos into the neighborhood and drug trade has threatened black gang leaders. Thus, black-Latino gang shootings have escalated.

Initially, the contention was between gangs over the drug business. But drive-by shootings killing innocent bystanders have spilled the strife into the neighborhood, pushing an economic conflict into a racial arena, he says.

The challenge is for us to realize Los Angeles’ diversity is as fundamental a characteristic as the city’s mountains and beaches.

Forty percent of Los Angeles’ population is foreign-born. “This is the only time this could have occurred. It has taken a [technological] journey of several millennia for us to get here, and we’re just feeling the first effects of this,” he says.

Traditional models view race in black or white. But the huge influx of Latinos and Asians, each of those categories a compendium of many nationalities, makes Los Angeles “demographically far more complicated” than older East Coast cities, he says.

Wakabayashi sees the city’s population base as a natural resource similar to the city beaches, and Angelenos facing a fundamental choice. Angelenos decided to staff the beaches with lifeguards, thus “mining” them as a resource. So, too, can we decide to “mine” our diverse population base, which otherwise has little inherent value.

In Canada, the Bill of Rights declares multiculturalism a basic characteristic of the nation. Perhaps, he suggests, it is time for us to similarly move beyond the old ideal of assimilation, learning how to make our differences work.

“We need to go beyond removing barriers between ethnic groups and address the underlying issues. We need to transform these potential riches into major assets.

“Our future may well depend on it.”