Discrimination Against Blacks

Paper Summary:

Though overt racism has diminished significantly in the United States over the last 30 years, most American cities remain deeply segregated, and a host of related problems - the lack of public services and private enterprise in inner-city Black neighborhoods, poverty, high crime, poor education- have persisted in part because of this segregation. This research examines and evaluates current social psychological theory as it relates to the issue of discrimination against a single minority group ? African-Americans, who as a group continued to be victimized by the legacy of nearly a century of institutional practices that have embedded racial and ethnic ghettos deep in our national urban demography. Examples for the literature are employed to argue that social psychology confronts many challenges as it attempts to come to terms with a seemingly embedded cultural phenomena.

From the Paper:

"From a theoretical perspective, categorization is regarded by social psychologists as a primary-process cognition implicit in racism (Ridley & Hill, 1999). The implication is that racism is not necessarily intentional, and that a number of secondary processes are implicitly at work in categorization. Secondary processes associated with racism include color blindness, color consciousness, cultural transference, cultural counter-transference pseudotransference, disconsciousness, splitting, stereotyping and stigmatizing. Ridley and Hill (1999) suggest that many of these secondary processes tend to operate unconsciously and involuntarily.

Baron and Byrne (2000) suggest that research findings have identified two explanations for the persistence of prejudice. First, individuals hold and retain prejudiced views because doing so bolsters their own self-image and allows them to affirm their own self-worth, feeling superior in various ways. Secondly, holding prejudiced views is theorized as saving the individual considerable cognitive effort. Given that human beings are regarded as cognitive misers or as investing the least possible amount of cognitive effort in most situations, stereotypes have the effect of saving or conserving mental effort. With respect to discrimination, blatant discrimination has become a thing of the past in many instances, but the new racism is regarded by Baron and Byrne (2000) as just as deadly if somewhat more subtle than blatant discrimination."

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