Racial prejudice: a phenomenon of social distance

In 1924, R. E. Park published The Concept of Social Distance as Applied to the Study of Racial Attitudes and Racial Relations, thus resuming the analysis carried out in 1921 together with Burgess on the types of behavior of individuals and of groups and the phenomenon of social distance. It is emphasized how these “accommodations so flagrantly displayed in the relation between white and black men (race prejudice)” are not confined solely to this specific relation but “The same mechanisms are involved in all the subordinations, exclusions, privacies, social distances, and reserves which we seek everywhere, by the subtle devices of taboo and social ritual, to maintain and defend”. The conceptualization of social distance in Park and Burgess’s volume is mediated, especially by Park, through Simmel’s formal sociology and will subsequently be elaborated, on a methodological level, by E. Bogardus through the relative measurement scale. The influence of the German sociologist is made evident by the constant reference Park makes to him in his writings, with particular reference to the treatment of the foreigner and to the spatial variable as constitutive of the dynamic form and meaning of social relations. This contribution aims to deepen the conceptual elaboration of social distance, starting from the argumentation in the volume by Park and Burgess.