Gordon Allports Symbols Essay

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Most people use symbols to categorize other people in order to remember them easer and to assign them attributes based on their symbols. This idea is explored in Gordon Allports essay The Language of Prejudice. Allport explains that symbol phobia occurs within people, but only when the symbol being discussed is assigned to themselves. Allports ideas are mirrored in Language and Thought by Susanne K. Langer and Black Men Public Spaces by Brent Staples. These authors argue that it is human nature to categorize and assign symbols to other people, and also to put symbols to words. When symbols become powerful enough, they become real, and that can lead to problems within a society.
In Allports essay, he describes the relationships between race, …show more content…

When something goes wrong in a country, the people demand that the government find something responsible for it. This is because there is always a need for an enemy to put peoples’ discontent and jitters upon (Allport 330). A prime example of this was when Hitler declared Jews the reason for Germanys’ troubles before World War II. Like Germany, America had its own problems in the aftermath of World War II. While what happened to America is standard for countries that have experienced war, its citizens were still afraid. Communism became the focus of everyone’s fears during that time. In the period after the war ended, the word Communism became something more powerful than the name of a political stance. Communism became a symbol, one that elevated the emotions and tensions of post war America. Americans knew little of what communism was at the time, but thanks to figures such as Joseph McCarthy, all they had to do was fear communism (Allport 331). Any words or symbols associated with communism, such as red or Bolshevik, became villainous because of their association with communism. Communism and the things associated with it stopped being symbols and became real things Americans feared. It was not in their school, police, or government, but it was in their heads that communism had infiltrated the …show more content…

Humans can spread ideas and concepts through to use of words alone. Words also give humans the ability to put names to objects (Langer 108). This what happens to infants who are able to speak the first time, they put certain words to certain objects. Langer describes a young child who receives a toy horse. The child yelps “horsey” over and over again. When he does this, he is conceptualizing the toy horse that is right in front of him (Langer 108). He knows that is a horse, and the next time he witnesses a horse, he will know that is one. The symbol to the child was the word horse. He was taught that they toy was a model of a horse, that the word “horse” symbolized what the toy was. That symbol, which is language, came to life when that boy conceptualized that language and objects can be

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