Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes (original) (raw)

Institutional Racism in America

Institutional Racism in America, 2020

People of color have never been free in AMERICA. The social construct of race has always been used to acquire and maintain power and to create artificial impediments that separate, control and silence the black and brown population. This social construction of “race” in AMERICA was constructed by elite white power to help construct artificial disparities between whites and blacks to describe black inferiority and white superiority. The fundamental suppositions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what Charles Mills wrote, “The terms of the Racial Contract mean that nonwhite ‘sub-personhood’ is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.” Racist ideas have long been intertwined into the social fabric of AMERICA. Ibram Kendi, the director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University noted that, “There has not been a society-wide and intensive challenge to racist ideas in the US…They’ve [non-black people] been taught that we are criminals, that we are violent that we are predators and think we need to be monitored.” Americans must decide whether AMERICA will truly be an interracial, multicultural democracy or whether AMERICA once again remains distinctly racist, unequal and immersed heavily in its racist past.

Perceiving personal discrimination: The role of group status and legitimizing ideology

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002

It was hypothesized that relative group status and endorsement of ideologies that legitimize group status differences moderate attributions to discrimination in intergroup encounters. According to the statuslegitimacy hypothesis, the more members of low-status groups endorse the ideology of individual mobility, the less likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from higher status group members to discrimination. In contrast, the more members of high-status groups endorse individual mobility, the more likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from lower status group members to discrimination. Results from 3 studies using 2 different methodologies provide support for this hypothesis among members of different high-status (European Americans and men) and low-status (African Americans, Latino Americans, and women) groups.

STRUCTURAL RACISM, INSTITUTIONAL AGENCY, AND DISRESPECT

In recent work, Joshua Glasgow has offered a definition of racism that is supposed to put to rest the debates between cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal, and institutionalist definitions. The key to such a definition, he argues, is the idea of disrespect. He claims: " φ is racist if and only if φ is disrespectful toward members of racialized group R as Rs. " While this definition may capture an important commonality among cognitive, behavioral, and attitudinal accounts of racism, I argue that his attempt to expand the definition to cover institutional or " structural " racism is less persuasive. Alternatively, I argue that structural racism must be understood in terms of injustice rather than disrespect. This involves giving a fuller account of how institutions are related to the beliefs, actions, and intentions of individuals, and thus how they can come to embody a certain kind of agency. In contemporary race theory and recent social and political philosophy generally, the proper understanding of racism has been a matter of significant contention. On the one hand, racism has been variously conceived in terms of belief, behavior, volition, and psychosexual aversion, just to name some of the main candidates. What these conceptions share, despite their differences, is that they attempt to explain and understand the racism of individuals. In this sense, one might consider them micro-analyses of racism. On the other hand, racism has been understood in structural or institutional terms, 1 as a system of power that disadvantages some to the benefit of others. These conceptions attempt to explain the racism of social structures and institutions rather than individuals. In this sense, then, one might consider them macro-analyses of racism. However, far from the image of complementary perspectives that the language of 'micro' and 'macro-analyses' suggests, these two perspectives are often understood as competing conceptions, not least because the two approaches lend themselves to

Exploring the Enigmatic Link between Religion and Anti-Black Attitudes

Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2015

This review explores social psychological perspectives on the complex relationship between religion and anti-Black prejudice in the United States. We examine the different ways in which religiosity has been conceptualized by behavioral scientists. We consider the methodological limitations of previous research, as well as how the advent of priming research introduces new empirical questions regarding religiosity and anti-Black prejudice, such as whether activation of different religious conceptions (e.g., God versus religion) or priming via different types of stimuli (e.g., words versus images) produces different outcomes. Finally, we discuss the lack of diverse samples in the present literature and highlight the need for additional research with Black American respondents. Conclusions consider the real world implications of links between religion and anti-Blackness for both White individuals (e.g., intergroup relations) and Black individuals (e.g., psychological functioning). "At age 10…what called my attention to the neglect of Africa, was the Sunday school lessons with all those White Angels… and when they say God is love, God is kind, God is no respect of kith or kin, I kept wondering why didn't he let one or two little Brown or Black angels sneak into heaven."-John Henrik Clarke, Professor of African Studies "And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have Black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is, and just so you know, we're just debating this because someone wrote about it, kids…Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure; that's a verifiable fact-as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that."-Megyn Kelly, Fox News Anchor Anti-Blackness can be found on every inhabited continent in the world (e.g., Bashi, 2004). In the contemporary United States, a society that has been dubbed by some as post-racial, conscious and unconscious racial biases persist across a variety of domains such as policing, hiring decisions, jury decision making, predatory lending practices, and physician/patient interactions, just to name a few (e.g.,