The Political Psychology of Race
•Racism was responsible for one of the most repressive regimes inmodern history, the apartheid government of South Africa
•Understanding racial divisions and conflicts requires us to gobeyond explanations that rely upon competition for resources ascauses of conflicts
•Political psychology enables us to understand how racial groups canlive together harmoniously for years, and then erupt in rise toextremes of hatred and fear, when people convinced by leaders andby rumors that their group is threatened by others
•How issues can be framed to produce anxieties in the minds ofcitizens
•stereotypes
•Group differentiation
•4 components of prejudice: a response to groupmembers based on their membership in thegroup, a negative evaluative orientation toward agroup and consequently an aversion to groupmembers, an attribution of negativecharacteristics toward a group and its membersthat is incorrect, and consistency in the negativeorientation toward the group and its members
•Stereotype: a set of beliefs about the personalattributes of a group of people
•Stereotypes and prejudices that producediscriminatory behavior are filled withnegative evaluation of the groups and itsmembers
Explaining racism and ethnocentrism
•Why do people stereotype others and engage indiscriminatory behavior?
•One of the oldest explanation for prejudice anddiscrimination is realistic conflict theory:discrimination is result of competition over scareresources such as jobs, housing, and good school
•Competition becomes more severe
•View the other in increasingly negative terms and theirwon group as superior
•Superordinate goals: goals that both competing groupsdesired and that required cooperation of groups,reduce the tension created as a result of competition
•Second explanation is social learning theory:according to this view, children learn negativeattitudes and discriminatory behaviors fromtheir parents, teachers, family, friends, andothers when they are rewarded (love,agreements)for such behaviors
•Social norms are also a powerful mechanismfor learning prejudice
•Social identity theory: prejudice and stereotypeamong groups occur even in the absence ofconflicting goals
•Competition can occur even when the sates areonly psychological with no real interaction orconflicting goals
•Social categorization and group identity arepartially responsible for the initial process ofgroup differentiation into in-groups and out-groups
•Motivation and personality traits have alsobeen examined in efforts to explain the causesof racism and ethnocentrism
•Authoritarian personality across cultures andare directly related to ethnocentrism:authoritarian submission, aggression, andconventionalism (blind acceptance of socialnorms)
•Social dominance theory: examines personality characteristic
•Social dominance orientation measures that differentiatives those whoprefer social group relations to be equal or hierarchical, and the extent towhich people want their in-group to dominate out-groups
•Behaviors as a product of social status and human disposition to formsocial groups that are arranged in a social hierarchy
•Three broad hierarchies: gender (male dominate females), age (adultelders), socially constructed groups identified as differentiated in terms ofrace, ethnicity, class, clan, or nationality.
•People in dominant groups are socialized, as individual, to have socialdominance orientation. They belong to groups that are on the top ofhierarch (dominate ideas and institutions), the social and political systembenefit them most and they use social and political structures tomaintain the hierarchical relationships among groups
•Why do racism and ethnocentrism occur?
•People tend to think of race as denoting biological differencesamong people, but in fact it is largely socially constructed
•What explains who the particular targets are?
•Social dominance perspective has provided an explanation as towhy some groups receive the worst treatment: competition forresources as a motivating factor producing prejudice
•Scapegoating sis result of social causality assessments-finding anout-group to blame for bad things that happen to the in-groups
•Projection: ascribing one’s own unacceptable and repressedimpulses or attributes to out-groups, explains whey they areregarded as inferior.
Race in the USA
•Since 1950s democratic principle of equality
•Changing attitudes have not produced socioeconomicequality between Blacks and Whites in the USA, greatdisparity between White and Black families living inpoverty
•More blacks are employed in white-collar jobs today,which is up from 5% in 1940 to 32% in 1990
•White Americans no longer regard African-Americansas biologically inferior to Whites, as they did duringslavery
•Racist attitudes in the USA have diminished aseducation levels have increased over the years
•Race and the Obama election: racial prejudicedid not influence the election of BarackObama’s Presidency
•It signals tremendous progress, but thiselection alone cannot undo thesocioeconomic impact of racism of the past
•Racial prejudice in the USA
•Politics-is-complicated model (principled objection model):it is argued that White Americans vary in the degree towhich they blame the inequalities between the cases onthe structural factors (historical legacy of slavery andcurrent system-wide discrimination) as opposed toindividual factors
•people broadly ethnocentric, hold number of socialstereotypes, and are generally socially intolerant
•Values related to authoritarianism
•Lack of consistency between support for equality betweenthe races and lack of support for policies to achieve thatequality
•Symbolic racism: what we have in America today as traditionalistAmerican individualist values
•Replaced that of the old pre-civil rights era racism, the new racismhas its foundation in conservative political values and theProtestant ethic’s moral values
•The data indicate that modern White prejudice toward Blacks is notbased on the old notions of biological inferiority, but on the beliefthat Blacks fail to try hard enough
•Symbolic racism is composed of: a conviction that Blacks are nolonger treated unfairly; that they do not have traditional Americanvalues, such as the work ethic and obedience to authority; that,despite this, they continue to demand special treatment fromgovernment
•Hostile feelings toward Blacks blend with conservative values toproduce new form of racism