The “good Samaritan” of Luke 10:30-37 may well have been prejudiced against Jews, but the Jew he saw by the wayside was a man fallen among thieves, who had robbed and beaten him and left him half dead. The Samaritan saw in that man not a Jew but a neighbor. Your “neighbor,” literally, is “somebody who lives near you,” but the word is defined in Luke as “somebody who needs your help.” The Samaritan, then, “had compassion” on this neighbor, “went to him, and bound his wounds . . . and took care of him.”
That prejudice exists in degrees identifies it as a human affliction, and suggests moreover that all humans, to some degree, are afflicted by it. Prejudice, carefully induced, motivated soldiers to kill one another in wars. It also causes some well-meaning people to assume that all who are in some way oppressed would be virtuous, sensible, and responsible if only they were not oppressed. In either case prejudice precludes authentic knowledge, therefore authentic judgement, therefore any appreciable degree of justice. It distorts or counterfeits reality. One enacts the only remedy when, as a neighbor, one looks through one’s prejudice or brushes it aside, to see the face of a neighbor, an actual neighbor, worthy or unworthy, who in any event will have to be dealt with as a person, not as a representative of some category.