Psychology of racism

SIGNIFICANCE: Students of racism examine the phenomenon of negative attitudes and behavior by members of the majority toward those who belong to racial and ethnic minorities. The topic of racism, which straddles the boundaries between social psychology and sociology, is connected with the study of intergroup relations, cognition, and attitudes in general.

The social and psychological study of prejudice and discrimination, including prejudice and discrimination against African Americans, has a long history. The term “racism,” however, did not enter the language of social psychology until the publication of the Kerner Report of 1968, which blamed all-pervasive “White racism” for widespread Black rioting in American cities. Although usually applied to Black-White relations in the United States, the term is also sometimes used with regard to White Americans’ relations with other minority groups such as Asian Americans or Latinos, or to Black-White relations outside the United States, for example, in Britain, Canada, or South Africa. Most of the studies and research on racism have focused on White racism against African Americans in the United States.

The Causes of Racism

Racism is seen by many social psychologists not as mere hatred but as a deep-rooted habit that is hard to change; hence, subvarieties of racism are distinguished. Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, in his book White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970), distinguishes between dominative racism, the desire to oppress African Americans, and aversive racism, the desire to avoid contact with African Americans. Aversive racism, Samuel L. Gaertner and John Dovidio find, exists among White people who pride themselves on being unprejudiced. David O. Sears, looking at White peoples' voting behavior and their political opinions as expressed in survey responses, finds what he calls symbolic racism: a resentment of African Americans for making demands in the political realm that supposedly violate traditional American values. Social psychologist James M. Jones distinguishes three types of racism: individual racism, the prejudice and anti-Black behavior deliberately manifested by individual White people; institutional racism, the social, economic, and political patterns that impersonally oppress African Americans regardless of the prejudice or lack thereof of individuals; and cultural racism, the tendency of White individuals to ignore or denigrate the special characteristics of Black culture.

Where Dovidio and Gaertner find aversive racism, Irwin Katz finds ambivalence. Many White people, he argues, simultaneously see African Americans as disadvantaged (which creates sympathy) and as deviating from mainstream social norms (which creates antipathy). Such ambivalence, Katz contends, leads to exaggeratedly negative reactions to negative behaviors by an African American, but also to exaggeratedly positive reactions to positive behaviors by an African American. He calls this phenomenon ambivalence-induced behavior amplification.

The reasons suggested for individual racism are many. John Dollard and others, in Frustration and Aggression (1939), see prejudice as the scapegoating of minorities in order to provide a release for aggression in the face of frustration; in this view, outbursts of bigotry are a natural response to hard economic times. Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif, in Groups in Harmony and Tension (1953) and later works, see prejudice of all sorts as the result of competition between groups. Theodor Adorno and others, in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), view prejudice, whether directed against African Americans or against Jewish people, as reflective of a supposedly fascist type of personality produced by authoritarian child-rearing practices. In Racially Separate or Together? (1971), Thomas F. Pettigrew shows that discriminatory behavior toward African Americans, and the verbal expression of prejudices against them, can sometimes flow simply from a White person’s desire to fit in with his or her social group. Finally, both prejudice and discrimination, many psychologists argue, are rooted in those human cognitive processes involved in the formation of stereotypes.

Stereotyping

Stereotypes are ideas, often rigidly held, concerning members of a group to which one does not belong. Social psychologists who follow the cognitive approach to the study of racism, such as David L. Hamilton, Walter G. Stephan, and Myron Rothbart, argue that racial stereotyping (the tendency of White people to see African Americans in some roles and not in others) arises, like any other kind of stereotyping, from the need of every human being to create some sort of order out of his or her perceptions of the world. Although stereotypes are not entirely impervious to revision or even shattering in the face of disconfirming instances, information related to a stereotype is more efficiently retained than information unrelated to it. White people, it has been found, tend to judge African Americans to be more homogeneous than they really are, while being more aware of differences within their own group: This is called the out-group homogeneity hypothesis. White people who are guided by stereotypes may act in such a way as to bring out worse behavior in African Americans than would otherwise occur, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why is stereotypical thinking on the part of White people about African Americans so hard to eliminate? The history of race relations deserves some of the blame. Some mistakes in reasoning common to the tolerant and the intolerant alike, such as the tendency to remember spectacular events and to think of them as occurring more frequently than is really the case (the availability heuristic), also occur in White peoples' judgments about members of minority groups. In addition, the social and occupational roles one fills may reinforce stereotypical thinking.

Pettigrew contends that attribution errors in explaining the behavior of others may have an important role to play in reinforcing racial stereotypes. The same behavioral act, Pettigrew argues, is interpreted differently by White people depending on the race of the actor. A positive act by a Black person might be ascribed to situational characteristics (for example, luck, affirmative action programs, or other circumstances beyond one’s control) and thus discounted; a positive act by a White person might be ascribed to personality characteristics. Similarly, a negative act might be ascribed to situational characteristics in the case of a White person, but to personality characteristics in the case of a Black person. The tendency of White people to view the greater extent of poverty among African Americans as solely the result of lack of motivation can be seen as a form of attribution error.

The Study of Racism and Prejudice

Although the study of racism per se began with the racial crisis of the 1960s, the study of prejudice in general goes back much further. As early as the 1920s, Emory Bogardus constructed a social distance scale measuring the degree of intimacy members of different racial and ethnic groups were willing to tolerate with one another. At first, psychologists tended to seek the roots of prejudice in the emotional makeup of the prejudiced individual rather than in the structure of society or the general patterns of human cognition. For many years, the study of antiblack prejudice was subsumed under the study of prejudice in general; those biased against African Americans were thought to be biased against other groups such as Jewish people, as well.

In the years immediately following World War II, American social psychologists were optimistic about the possibilities for reducing or even eliminating racial and ethnic prejudices. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and The Nature of Prejudice (1954), by Gordon Allport, reflect the climate of opinion of the time. Allport, whose view of prejudice represented a mixture of the psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches, used the term “racism” to signify the doctrines preached by negrophobe political demagogues; he did not see it as a deeply ingrained bad habit pervading the entire society. Pettigrew, who wrote about anti-Black prejudice from the late 1950s on, cast doubt on the notion that there was a specific type of personality or pattern of child rearing associated with prejudice. Nevertheless, he long remained in the optimistic tradition, arguing that changing White people’s discriminatory behavior through the enactment of civil rights laws would ultimately change their prejudiced attitudes.

The more frequent use by social psychologists of the term “racism” from the late 1960s onward indicates a growing awareness that bias against African Americans, a visible minority, might be harder to uproot than that directed against religious and ethnic minorities. Social psychologists studying racial prejudice shifted their research interest from the open and noisy bigotry most often found among political extremists (for example, the Ku Klux Klan) to the quiet, everyday prejudices of the average apolitical individual. Racial bias against African Americans came to be seen as a central, rather than a peripheral, feature of American life.

Responses to surveys taken from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s indicated a steady decline in the percentage of White Americans willing to admit holding racist views. Yet in the 1970s, the sometimes violent White hostility to school busing for integration, and the continuing social and economic gap between Black and White America, gave social psychologists reason to temper their earlier optimism. The contact hypothesis, the notion that contact between different racial groups would reduce prejudice, was subjected to greater skepticism and ever more careful qualification. Janet Ward Schofield, in her field study of a desegregated junior high school, detected a persistence of racial divisions among the pupils; reviewing a number of such studies, Walter Stephan similarly discerned a tendency toward increased interracial tension in schools following desegregation. The pessimism suggested by field studies among younger teenagers was confirmed by experiments conducted in the 1970s and 1980s on college students and adults; such studies demonstrated the existence even among supposedly nonprejudiced people of subtle racism and racial stereotyping.

Particularly following an increase of awareness of incidences in which White police officers shot and killed often unnarmed African Americans beginning largely in 2014, the national discussion regarding racism targeting African Americans frequently focused on the concept of the psychology behind implicit bias. Since the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in the 1990s, psychologists have reported that a large percentage of White Americans actually possess implicit biases about African Americans that were likely formed by the culture in which they grew up. Some have argued that implicit bias may play a large role in the fact that while explicit bias has seemed to decrease, racism and prejudice still prevail in American society. At the same time, others have questioned the psychological quality of the IAT.

While social psychological experiments contribute to an understanding of the reasons for negative attitudes toward African Americans by White people, and for discriminatory behavior toward African Americans even by those White people who believe themselves to be tolerant, they do not by any means provide the complete answer to the riddle of racial prejudice and discrimination. Unlike many other topics in social psychology, racism has also been investigated by journalists, historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and even literary critics. The techniques of social psychology surveys, controlled experiments, and field studies provide only one window on this phenomenon.

Bibliography

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Addison, 1954.

Cuncic, Arlin. "The Psychology of Racism." Very Well Mind, 12 Feb. 2024, www.verywellmind.com/the-psychology-of-racism-5070459. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

Dovidio, John F., and Samuel L. Gaertner, editors. Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism. Academic, 1986.

Jones, James M., et al. The Psychology of Diversity: Beyond Prejudice and Racism. Wiley, 2014.

Katz, Irwin. Stigma: A Social Psychological Analysis. Erlbaum, 1981.

Katz, Phyllis A., editor. Towards the Elimination of Racism. Pergamon, 1976.

Miller, Arthur G., editor. In the Eye of the Beholder: Contemporary Issues in Stereotyping. Praeger, 1982.

Mooney, Chris. "The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men." Mother Jones, 1 Dec. 2014, www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

Pettigrew, Thomas F., et al. Prejudice. Belknap, 1982.

Singal, Jesse. "Psychology's Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn't Up to the Job." New York, 11 Jan. 2017, nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.