““Like his colleague Thomas, he viewed prejudice as a form of instinct, but where Thomas set it down to a reaction to the Other’s physical appearance, Park saw in it a manifestation of competition: Race prejudice may be regarded as a spontaneous, more or less instinctive defense-reaction, the practical effect of which is to restrict free competition between races. Its importance as a social function is due to the fact that free competition, particularly between people with different standards of living, seems to be, if not the original source, at least the stimulus to which race prejudice is the response.48 Park’s reference to free competition hinted at the strains being placed on society in a postwar context in which massive foreign (and particularly Asian) immigration had resumed. He argued that where fundamental racial interests are not yet controlled by law, custom, or other arrangement between the groups in question, racial prejudice will inexorably develop. It may, however, be deflected by ‘the extension of the machinery of cooperation and social control’ – in the U.S. case, the caste system and slavery: we may regard caste, or even slavery, as one of those accommodations through which the race problem found a natural solution. Caste, by relegating the subject race to an inferior status, gives to each race at any rate a monopoly of its own tasks. When this status is accepted by the subject people, as in the case where the caste or slavery systems become fully established, racial competition ceases and racial animosity tends to disappear ... Each race being in its place, no obstacle to racial cooperation exists.49 This paper shows that Park’s thought in 1917 was not free of obfuscation and bias. One finds him maintaining that while ‘caste and the limitation of free competition is economically unsound,’ it is nonetheless ‘politically desirable’50 because””
