Topic Prejudice and Discrimination Transmission

Module 4: Transmission of Race Prejudice

Until the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and sociologists promoted the racial hierarchy, the idea that the Caucasian race is the most civilized, with all other groups primitive to varying degrees. Around the 1930s, social scientists began to view this hierarchy as disturbing and deeply flawed. They developed a new way of looking at racial groups, yet racism and racial prejudice still prevailed in American society. Psychologists began to work with other social scientists to study how racial ideas formed and how they could be changed.

In the second section of this module, we will follow researchers who study how children learn and conceptualize prejudice. We will track the recent discovery that children in the United States have a solid understanding of our society's racial views at a very young age.

The third topic covers how prejudice (ideas) and discrimination (acts) are transmitted in society. We will examine the role of culture in this process. Racial stereotypes are passed along through the various institutions of society, such as the family, the religious group, the classroom, and the media. Culture acts a conduit for racial ideas, helping transmit them across generations like a wire conducting electricity.

The concluding topic in this module focuses on the ways in which we can come to know our implicit biases, and what we can do to help improve race relations.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the study of race blossomed from that of black and white relations into that of a rainbow of multicultural interchanges. Social scientists began to notice inequalities in American life as suffered by groups such as Native Americans and immigrants. Starting in the 1970s, the major groups of immigrants in the United States came not from Europe, but from Asia and Latin America.

This module again employs an intersectional analysis. Our analysis crosses the disciplinary borders of sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. The study of prejudice encompasses a large number of topics. These include in-group/out-group relations, intergroup contact, culture, immigration, assimilation, friendship, conformity, individual identity, anxiety, and personality theory.

The intersection at which these topics meet is a very busy place. In the twentieth century, paradigms (frameworks) for thinking about racial matters shifted. Psychoanalytic theory exerted its influence and then waned as social scientists developed and implemented statistical frameworks for carrying out research, as well as new definitions of key terms. We cannot therefore identify every car racing through our crowded intersection, honking its horn. We cannot separate vehicles caught in hopeless gridlock.

Instead, we can focus on a few ideas and findings to help you appreciate how complex the topic of prejudice has become. We can look into how and why racial ideas are transmitted. We can also explore avenues that can take us out of the gridlock—namely, ways in which we can teach tolerance, foster cultural understanding, and promote respect for human rights.

Module 4: Transmission of Race Prejudice

Topics

I. Viewing Racism in the Past

II. Teaching Racial Views to Children

III. Transmitting Racial Ideas

IV. Improving Self-Understanding and Race Relations

V. Summary

I. Viewing Racism in the Past

We begin by discussing ways in which concepts of race and race relations in the United States have changed over time.

Shifting Views

The Western (European and American) concept of the racial hierarchy, a model in which whites are seen as superior to all other racial groups, lost scientific support following World War II (1939–1945). In fact, opinions about racial differences changed so radically in the postwar years that we can identify these changes as a paradigm shift, a reexamination and reconfiguration of the whole conceptual framework of an issue. In the postwar years, the idea of racial types disappeared as well.

The racial hierarchy was "in" among scientists, and then it was "out"; how did such a radical change take place? There were several reasons. Eugenicists (discussed in module 2) had argued that poverty came about because of "bad genes." Between the world wars, however, the Great Depression occurred, and Americans discovered that "poverty could happen to anybody" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 130).

Little by little, Americans recognized that poverty sometimes came about because of unfavorable economic conditions, and not because of personal failings. At the end of World War II, Americans were horrified to realize that American eugenic ideas helped provide the scientific platform from which the Nazis developed their programs to exterminate the Jews and other groups. People in the United States now wished to distance themselves from American "racial science"—eugenics in particular—and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Also contributing to the paradigm shift, the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and psychology began to open to women and to racial minorities, who moved agendas in a liberal and even leftist political direction. These new social scientists introduced topics to the field and worked "for justice and democracy in a still-overtly racist society" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 130).

Following World War II, society began to question the view of nonwhite minorities as inferior. In fact, this attitude was now considered pathological (Jackson & Weidman, 2004). Here, pathology refers to abnormality, or a deviation from the norm. From the mid-1940s to the present, sociologists and social psychologists have considered racism an abnormal behavior.

Park's Race Relations Cycle

When sociologists and social psychologists took up the study of racial attitudes and prejudice, much of the work flowed from the Caucasian sociologist Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago and his students in the 1920s and 1930s. Park worked extensively among Africans and African Americans.

Read more about sociologist Robert Park, a pioneer of American race relations sociology.

Park believed that all racial groups would eventually assimilate. In assimilation, newly arrived groups give up their customs and language and adopt those of the dominant group in order to blend in and become indistinguishable from the members of that group. Park believed that, within a few generations, minority groups would blend in with the dominant white culture in America, their cultural differences no longer evident.

Park proposed four stages characterizing the transition to full assimilation (Marger, 2006):

1. Contact: Groups migrate and move into neighborhoods with one another.

2. Competition: Groups engage in competition for scarce resources, such as jobs and housing. This can lead to conflict.

3. Accommodation: In this stage, groups accommodate, or coexist, while remaining apart.

4. Assimilation: Assimilation involves joining the dominant group, settling in, being accepted, and feeling a sense of belonging. The group who fully assimilates "disappears into" the dominant culture.

What is your personal view of Park's cycle? Do you believe that all racial and ethnic groups eventually assimilate and "disappear" into the white dominant group in the United States? Why or why not? Using Park's race relations cycle, describe points at which difficulties seem most likely to arise.

The Role of Prejudice

Park believed that prejudice was a necessary consequence of competition and conflict among newly entering groups. Park and his students viewed prejudice, the dislike of racial groups other than one's own, as a negative force in the community. They found that prejudice hurt and caused social pathology (damage) to individuals trying to assimilate (Jackson & Weidman, 2004).

In the 1930s, social psychologists decided that individuals expressing prejudice held an "irrational attitude" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 147). Researchers in the 1930s focused on the irrationality of racial prejudice and its disconnection from real experience.

Prominent among those studying the effects of prejudice on black Americans were two African American sociologists, Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. Johnson, a student of Park's, found rural African American children content with the segregated world in which they lived, but not with the segregated schools they attended. Johnson found schools for black children in the South "completely inadequate"; they "created 'misshapen personalities' in black children" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 151).

Frazier shared Johnson's view of the debilitating effects of prejudice, and focused on the damage done to the black family by slavery and segregation.

Learn more about the career and accomplishments of E. Franklin Frazier.

The White Yardstick

In "The Pathology of Race Prejudice," a study published in 1927 in The Forum, a leading academic journal of the social sciences, Frazier put forth data on African American families, focusing on marriage and other social institutions. Frazier's work was groundbreaking, the first sociological study of black families. However, his interpretation of his data seems puzzling to us today. He compared African American families with white, middle-class families, and concluded that African American families were inferior.

Frazier reported that "African Americans, because of their heritage of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and poor environmental conditions, had developed a pathological variant of mainstream American society" (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, p. 151). Anthropologists stressed the influence of African customs to explain the differences between black and white families. Frazier, however, found the matriarchal (mother in charge) African American households abnormal and believed that they contributed to poverty, juvenile delinquency, and crime (Jackson & Weidman, 2004).

African Americans were outraged at being labeled pathological by one of their own, and Frazier lost his job. He had produced the first sociological study of the black family, however, and his scholarship was excellent and important. His interpretation of the data, not his collection of it, caused the uproar.

Frazier's negative view of the black family was taken up in social science literature for decades. He discussed his ideas in his influential book The Negro Family in the United States (1939), and the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal picked up and prominently featured his findings in his own comprehensive and influential study of race relations, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

The pathological view of the black family was used as evidence in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). It also appeared in a highly influential report by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action(1965).

Read Moynihan's report,  The Negro Family: The Case for National Action , and consider the question below.

In what regard did Moynihan incorporate E. Franklin Frazier's view of the African American family? Model Answer

In his report, Moynihan argued for ending matriarchal families and for instituting black men as the breadwinners and heads of the family (Jackson & Weidman, 2004).

It appears that Frazier used the old "white" yardstick to measure conditions in the black family, a strategy that echoes those used by race scientists early in the century. He gauged the health of African American families by comparing them with white families, interpreting areas of divergence as defects. Certainly, he intended in his writing to highlight the damage to blacks caused by slavery and discrimination, but his conclusions did not respect African American family structures, customs, or social institutions.

What choices did Frazier have in evaluating the black family? He could have followed the lead of anthropologists who engaged in (and continue to engage in) cultural relativity—the study of cultures for their own attributes, without assigning value judgments. In the same era as Frazier, anthropologist Melville Herskovitz suggested that sociologists studying the black family should look at African family structures for prototypes; that could have been a choice made by Frazier (Jackson & Weidman, 2004).

A second passage from Frazier's 1939 book, The Negro Family in the United States, reveals his belief in the racial hierarchy. The racial hierarchy had two components, the first of which was the ranking of cultures from the "most primitive" to the "most civilized." Those cultures ranked as "primitive" were valued as inferior to those ranked "civilized and enlightened." The second component was an onward-and-upward assumption. Advocates of the racial hierarchy believed that groups deemed "more primitive" were incapable of advancing toward "civilization and enlightenment."

Frazier, however, praised the black family for its speedy progress along the continuum from primitivism toward enlightenment:

The evolution of the Negro family in the United States has a special significance for the science of culture. Within the short space of one hundred and fifty years, the Negro family has telescoped the age-long evolution of the human family. On the basis of concrete factual materials it is possible to trace the evolution of the Negro family from its roots in human nature to a highly institutionalized form of human association. (Frazier, 1949, p. 142)

When Frazier said that the Negro family "telescoped the age-long evolution of the human family," he referred to the discarded, racist idea that societies could be ranked along a continuum that indicated their progress from savagery and primitivism to civilization and enlightenment (white society being the example for civilization and enlightenment). This idea served as the basis for the anthropological exhibits at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, discussed in module 1. Frazier agreed with this viewpoint, conceptualizing African American advancement as a march toward whiteness.

E. Franklin Frazier found that the black family differed from the white family. Do you think he was justified in labeling these differences pathological or abnormal?

Frazier's admirable investigation of a culture that had been ignored is an extraordinarily valuable contribution to sociology. However, his value judgments about the black family came from the older era of scientific racism. Having one foot in the old paradigm and the other in the new is a common occurrence in the event of a paradigm shift.

Other influences must have entered Frazier's work to help explain his condemnation of the African American family. The 1930s were the heyday of psychoanalysis in the United States. Sigmund Freud's theories centered on the pathological power of mothers, holding that women caused long-term damage to their children. Perhaps, following most social scientists of his era, Frazier believed that the matriarchal structures he found in black families were corrupt and damaging to family members.

Allport's Model

In the years after Frazier's article, thesis, and books on African American families emerged, a white psychologist named Gordon Allport began studying prejudice. Today, most research in this area can be traced back either to Frazier's ideas about pathology or to Allport's ideas about prejudice. Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice has served as a starting point for considerable research, establishing the core issues for a half-century of psychological studies.

The strength of Frazier's work lies in his careful description of the victims of prejudice and their family structure. The strength of Allport's work lies in the perspectives he took. Allport used the macro (effects broadly affecting society) viewpoints of sociologists looking at historical and societal influences, and the micro (effects within individual persons) viewpoints of particular psychologists.

Unfortunately, the weakness of Allport's work resides in the very same attributes; dipping into many sources in many disciplines, he came up with contradictory information and ideas. However, Allport's findings proved highly stimulating to later researchers in the field (Dovidio et al., 2005).

Allport defined prejudice as "an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization" (Eagly & Diekman, 2005, p. 19). On another occasion, in a 1967 interview completed just before his death, Allport again defined prejudice:

In prejudice, there is always an element of ignorance—unwarranted hostility—or else it's not prejudice. To put it in more dignified terms, let's use Thomas Aquinas' definition that prejudice is 'thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant'.…Prejudice must be defined as having two variables—one is hostility, and one is ignorance or erroneous judgment. Otherwise you don't have prejudice. (Evans, 1981, p. 59)

Allport reported his own difficulty in identifying and organizing the many causes he found for prejudice. He said that it took him several years to "figure out the table of contents" for his book because of the existence of so many facets and possible causes of prejudice (Evans, 1981, p. 59).

Allport zeroed in on what he considered to be the major factors contributing to or concerning prejudice, which sociologists continue to study today. These factors range from societal trends (such as discrimination in housing and health care) to factors within individuals (such as fear of members of other groups).

II. Teaching Racial Views to Children

Here, we focus on the ways in which children absorb racial prejudices and learn how to navigate our multicultural society.

Allport's View

Since the 1950s, social scientists have speculated on how and at what age children pick up racial ideas. As social scientists develop more sophisticated and subtle ways to study issues related to childhood, they realize that children think and learn at much younger ages and at much higher levels of sophistication than previously suspected. In the nineteenth century, people believed that newborns were blind and incapable of understanding or learning, gaining the ability to learn only at around age 6.

Today, we recognize that newborns have many capabilities, and that they start learning even before birth. When the leading researcher on race, psychologist Gordon Allport, investigated the topic in the 1950s, he made these hypotheses (Aboud, 2005, pp. 310–325):

· At around 4 to 6 years of age, children develop "emotions attached to labels"; for example, they might learn to dislike someone.

· At around age 6 to 12, children develop learned overgeneralizations; that is, they apply information about a person they dislike to all people of that race.

· After age 12, children gain the ability to differentiate within the racial category and to modify their own attitudes to fit individuals (later in their teens).

In contrast with Allport, researchers today find that children understand racial matters at an early age. Psychologists find prejudice and acts of discrimination occurring among preschool children.

In the 50 years of research on children and prejudice, social scientists have found that no parent wishes to take responsibility for teaching racial intolerance. When interviewed, parents invariably assert that they cannot possibly be the source of racist statements or actions; they maintain that their child must have picked up these ideas from other children or from adults in the neighborhood or the media (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001).

Prejudice is a complex topic, and its complexity appears to have increased between the time of Allport's research in the 1950s and today. Allport identified four elements involved in the development of prejudice:

· learning

· conformity

· identity and status

· developmental stage

Learning

Allport suggested that children learn prejudice from "parents freely expressing their views…[learning] to associate a racial label with an emotion" (Aboud, 2005, p. 311). He believed that prejudice is learned at home. Allport also made a connection that has not held up over time and that modern research has failed to confirm: he believed in a link between strict, authoritarian parenting and the development of a prejudice-prone and inflexible personality.

Conformity

Allport held that conformity was the next most important influence on prejudice. He reasoned that, because children wish to be like their parents, they adopt their parents' views of the society and its inequalities. Allport believed that contact with children of different racial groups, what he called intergroup experience, was a positive influence, helping to reduce prejudice. Modern research has confirmed that this is the case for both children and adults.

Identity and Status

In Allport's view, identity and status help promote prejudice. Observing and mimicking their parents' comments and actions, children come to feel that they belong to a group that denigrates members of other groups (Aboud, 2005, p. 312).

Developmental Stage

Finally, Allport believed that children develop a more sophisticated idea of prejudice as they progress through developmental stages.

Vivian Paley and Justification Theory

Vivian Gussin Paley served as a classroom teacher for over 37 years. She had one rule in her University of Chicago laboratory school: "You can't say, you can't play." This was also the title of her 1996 book. Paley noticed that children always excluded someone from their play groups. The context of the play did not matter. A group of girls playing in the doll corner of the kindergarten and a group of older boys playing baseball on the playground were equally exclusive. Every activity in elementary school had its outcasts.

Meet Vivian Gussin Paley, winner of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 2004 Outstanding English Language Arts Educator Award. Read interviews and learn more about her influential books on classroom life.

Paley referred to this outcasting of students as the habit of rejection or exclusion. Further, she noted that even if the children were homogenous (all having the same race, gender, or interests), they still found a way and a reason to exclude someone.

When Paley introduced her new rule, most students felt that it was fair, but that it would not work. Depending on their grade and maturity level, the children developed fairly sophisticated reasons for thinking this. Students in grades 5–6 reasoned that letting someone into their circle that they did not like would ultimately be unfair to that person, as the group would treat him or her poorly. Some children suggested that exclusion was part of life, and better to learn it now. Younger children felt that the rule not work if it were forced upon the students.

Paley discussed these findings in terms of justification theory. Justification theory maintains that a tendency exists among groups to defend the status quo (Blast & Jost, 2006). Based on their age and developmental level, children came up with different rationales as to why the rule would not work. Some of these operated on the individual level, with individual group members patting themselves on the back and agreeing that, although the rule would not fly, it was indeed fair. These children relieved themselves of guilt and responsibility by stating that the boss of their group had excluded the unwanted students.

Other justifications worked at the group level, with members defending the interests of the group by arguing that, if they let the rejected children in, the group would not treat them very well. The system's interests were defended and legitimized by children rationalizing that exclusion and rejection were part of life (or the system), and that rejection now would help these children handle rejection later (Paley, 1992).

Justifying the status quo maintains it and legitimizes it. Even minority groups who hold a lower status in American society have a tendency to justify their place on the bottom of the ladder. This explains why some minority groups internalize inferiority, sometimes referred to as self-hate. Justifications or rationalizations of this kind are difficult to uncover, because they often operate below the level of awareness.

The process of rationalization and justification operates in a way that is largely invisible and that serves the interests of the individual and the group. Justification theorists argue that the members of a group are bound by ethnocentrism. The "my group is better than your group" ideology acts as the glue that holds the members together. The ideology builds in-group solidarity like the digging of a moat around a castle. Members maintain in-group solidarity by defending the interests of the group to the exclusion or the detriment of other groups. Out-group members become targets for prejudice and hostility (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1982).

Paley's research was qualitative in nature. In this context, qualitative means descriptive and narrative, coming from eyewitness accounts, tapes, or videotapes of events. Qualitative work contrasts with quantitative research, which is based on the formulation of hypotheses, the collection of data, and statistical analysis and interpretation. Paley used classroom dialogue and her experiences as a teacher rather than hard data to analyze and describe the situations she studied.

Contemporary Issues

Social scientists carried out few studies of prejudice in children in Allport's day, and much of Allport's thinking on the matter is cloaked in psychoanalytic concepts that permeated psychology in the 1950s.

One psychoanalytic idea that has disappeared is that children who become prejudiced adults come from homes where punishment was severe, parents were authoritarian, and most issues had only a right or a wrong answer. Harsh toilet training also made the list. Psychoanalysts believed that inflexible parenting fostered rigidity, anxiety, and prejudice. When later researchers included parenting variables in their studies, they found no association between racial intolerance and an authoritarian upbringing. Little by little, psychoanalytically derived ideas have given way to findings based on experimental research—that is, research in which data is collected and analyzed statistically.

Why have psychoanalytic ideas not held up under modern scrutiny? Psychoanalytic theory, developed by Sigmund Freud, came from the study of adults with mental health problems. Freud theorized about children, but he never actually studied a single child! His ideas, coming from myths, literary and cultural sources, and his own reasoning, could not be framed as scientific questions, and have not been supported by careful, quantitative, scientific investigations. Freud's appeal today stems from his use of myths and other cultural artifacts as sources for behavioral analysis. These have historic and literary interest to people around the world, and resonate with them.

In a review of contemporary research on prejudice in children, psychologist Frances Aboud (2005) notes many new ways of conceptualizing the development of prejudice in children and adolescents. In his work, Allport identified about twenty causes of prejudice, ranging from macro factors in society, such as in-group and out-group relations, to the personality of individuals and the qualities of victims (Evans, 1981). Aboud has found, however, that most causes remain effective only fleetingly, as other, more potent combinations of variables take hold.

In her work, Aboud focuses on

· cognition

· age differences

· experimenter effects

· social rules

· cognitive-development stages

Cognition

Today, research on prejudice emphasizes cognition (learning) and the ability of children to understand sophisticated concepts such as racial intolerance. Researchers believe that children's understanding of prejudice is "less sophisticated and more tentative" than that of adults (Aboud, 2005, p. 313).

Between 1940 and 1944, African American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted research on black children and their attitudes toward themselves. This research came to be known as the doll study, which we briefly discussed in module 3.

Although Mamie Clark found that black nursery school children recognized their own skin color and were satisfied with it, the Clarks later collected data on school-age children and found that black children were likely to identify a brown doll as "bad" and a white doll as "good." The Clarks were the first to investigate black children's attitudes toward themselves (Jackson & Weidman, 2004, pp. 148–149).

Listen to an interview and watch a video:

· Listen to an interview with Kenneth Clark by Margot Adler on National Public Radio.

· Watch the video  A Girl Like Me , which explores the self-esteem and self-concept of African American women and girls in America.

Age Differences

Aboud reports that younger children are more likely to avoid a racially different group or child than to carry out some action against the child or group. Younger children usually experience "suspicion, fear, sadness, and disapproval and [prejudice is] expressed as avoidance, social exclusion, and negative evaluation" (Aboud, 2005, p. 314). These subtle behaviors are more difficult to capture and measure than are overt acts of discrimination.

Researchers studying implicit and explicit forms of prejudice have very different findings because "children often do not show consistency between attitudes and behavior." For example, "children may have several cross-race friends with whom they play on a daily basis, but they may not integrate and generalize this information" (Aboud, 2005, p. 314). That is, they may not apply their experiences to their thinking about racial groups in general.

Experimenter Effects

In psychological research, problems arise from "the social nature of the psychological or behavioral experiment itself" (Rosenthal, 1966, p. vii). Robert Rosenthal termed these experimenter effects, recognizing that "some of the complexity of….the research subject, resides not in the subject himself but rather in the particular experimenter and in the interaction between subject and experimenter" (Rosenthal, 1966, p. vii). Rosenthal found that the researcher represents a particular type of person to the subject, and that the subject forms his or her answers with the researcher in mind.

This brings up another problem especially common to research on prejudice: when the research questions change, when a different individual (or an individual from a different race) asks the questions, or when the experimental task changes, children and adults alike change their answers to reflect what they believe the experimenter wishes to hear. Researchers find that the answers they receive differ with every change to the experimental situation or experimenter. This suggests highly complex experimenter/subject relations. In later research, Rosenthal demonstrated that teachers' (and experimenters') expectations of students in classrooms actually changed the students' performance.

Social Rules

Aboud finds that the youngest children (up to age 5) are keenly interested in learning social rules, and that they may take on a prejudicial viewpoint even if their parents are not openly intolerant. For example, Aboud notes that young children may see people gather in same-race groups. They may find that their family does not associate with people of different races, and they may conclude that people of different races should be avoided (Aboud, 2004).

Cognitive-Developmental Stages

Aboud suggests that programs to reduce prejudice need to take into account children's level of understanding—their cognitive-developmental stage. Children can be reached and prejudice diminished if adults approach youngsters with messages that they can understand—that is, messages appropriate to their developmental and cognitive stage.

III. Transmitting Racial Ideas

Race prejudice, like all prejudices, is learned. Educator and human rights advocate Nathan Rutstein defines prejudice as an "unquestioned emotional attachment to a falsehood that is assumed to be the truth" (Rutstein, 1997, p. 31). The falsehood, according to Rutstein, is the belief held by some groups that they are superior to other groups. Individuals often present racist ideas through a web of denial, rationalization, and justification.

The In-Group and the Out-Group

Human interaction in social and cultural groups acts as a mechanism for learning, maintaining, and transmitting racial ideas and practices. Allport believed that it was normal for people to congregate into social groups. He also felt that it was normal for people to focus on the relations of their own in-group, and to evaluate those of outsiders, that is, members of out-groups, in a less favorable way (Dovidio et al., 2005).

What are your in-groups and out-groups?

You probably belong to several official and unofficial groups. Reflect on the groups to which you belong. These can include religious organizations, fans of a sport you like, voters of your preferred political party, and so on. These are your in-groups.

Who, then, belongs to the out-groups? These can include members of a different religious organization, people who are fans of a team you don't like, voters who support a different political party, and so on.

List your in-groups. What are your feelings about members of your in-groups? What are your feelings about members of your out-groups?

Stereotypes

Allport helped focus psychological research on stereotypes and their impact on in-groups and out-groups. Stereotypes are descriptions of groups "but also [are] cognitive structures that shape thoughts, feelings, and action" (Dovidio et al., 2005, p. 5). Allport found that judging people according to group involved gathering as many attributes of a particular group as possible, and crystallizing those attributes into a stereotype. Racial and ethnic groups are especially prone to stereotyping. Allport found that the tiniest visible characteristic of an out-group conjured up all the elements of the stereotype (Dovidio et al., 2005, p. 5).

Make a list of the characteristics of the people who belong to the same political party as you, and another list of the characteristics you associate with those who belong to a political party with which you do not identify. How would you describe those who support your party? How would you describe those who belong to a different party?

Are any stereotypes coming up in your lists?

Make a list of the characteristics of people who drive the automobile of your dreams. Are any stereotypes coming up in your list?

Stereotypes work by creating what is called a blind spot in perception, also referred to as perception bias. This means that when we encounter someone or something that does not conform to the stereotype, generalization, or image that we have in our heads, we disregard the evidence as an exception to the rule. For example, if we believe that women are too emotional to function as airplane pilots and we encounter a woman who is an effective pilot, we discount her as an exceptional case. This enables us to confirm and maintain the stereotype. When the stereotype becomes unconsciously ingrained, we only recognize examples that confirm our hidden bias.

Stereotypes can also be positive, though they still are shorthand exaggerations of characteristics, and often lead to erroneous conclusions about people. Two examples: Russian chess expert, blonde woman driving a convertible.

Stereotypes can be triggered or primed by visual stimuli. What type of person comes to mind when you look at each of these items? How do these associations reflect stereotypes and prejudice?

baseball mitt	oven mitt

Other researchers noted that age stereotypes or associations are triggered in both young and old people (Levy & Banaji, 2002). Using pairings such as old/young and good/bad, both young and old associated "good" with being young. The studies also revealed a divergence or split between explicit and implicit attitudes. Participants demonstrated fewer overt or outward associations of "bad" with "old" than they did implicitly. This indicates that people make efforts to hide their bias against older people.

Countering the common assumption that young children are free from bias, studies suggest that white American children from ages 6 to 10 have an implicit racial bias against African Americans. This bias seems to continue well into adulthood without decline (Baron & Banaji, 2006). With the same subjects, however, the racial bias against the Japanese dropped off as those tested passed into adulthood. For more information on this study, please go to the Project Implicit Web site.

Power

To better understand prejudice and discrimination, we need to take power into account. The majority or dominant group in society is the group that controls most of the resources and wields the most power within different institutional settings. These settings include those of government, religion, education, and commerce. Minority groups lack equal access to these institutional settings, resources, privileges, and opportunities. The power imbalance reinforces the notion that minority groups are inferior. It's a chicken-and-egg problem; prejudice leads to power imbalance, and power imbalance reinforces prejudice.

Racial ideas and biases are not inborn; they are picked up in subtle ways from the environment. One's upbringing and family, education, acquaintances, and affiliations all contribute to misperceptions and mental distortions about race. Racial ideas incubate and grow in homes, schools, workplaces, organizations, media outlets, government, and anywhere else in society where people and groups interact.

Racism as Illness

Human rights advocate and educator Nathan Rutstein likens racism to illness, specifically, to a highly contagious disease. He points to contact with racist individuals as the source of "infection" (Rutstein, 1997). We can be infected thorough sustained contact or interaction with the sick. In Racism: Unraveling the Fear, Rutstein reflects on his childhood to find the sources of his own racism. He examines the feelings of prejudice he experienced while sharing an apartment with an African American. Believing himself to be open-minded, he discovered that he harbored hidden stereotypes against blacks. While participating in advocacy efforts to help minorities, Rutstein discovered that he was still infected with feelings of racial superiority.

After much self-examination, Rutstein traces these feelings back to several scenes in which his parents openly expressed negative opinions of African Americans, despite their generally liberal attitude. Rutstein describes, for example, how his parents opposed an African American family's moving into the house next door when he was a child in the 1960s. He remembers feeling frightened and agitated because the incident upset the tranquility of his home. Years later, when he learned that his college roommate would be an African American, prejudgment set in. Prejudice is often simply expressed as the prejudgment of a person, usually based on faulty or incomplete information or stereotypes.

Racism as Anxiety

Anita Remignanti is a psychologist who studies the nature of racism (Rutstein & Morgan, 1996). She defines racism as the "systematic denigration of a group of people, based on confusion and distortions" (Rutstein & Morgan, 1996, p. 71). Racism, she finds, is based on the old racial hierarchy, the belief that whites are superior and that people of color are inferior. Remignanti likens racism to a deep-seated anxiety based on fear and distortion of reality. The inaccurate views put forth in racist thinking imply the existence of clear divisions between races of people (Rutstein & Morgan, 1996).

Remignanti finds that distorted racial thinking can be communicated in any number of ways, such as through individuals, the media, the school system, and government policies and practices.

How is racism similar to anxiety?

Remignanti identifies the inaccuracies, distortions, and fears in racial thinking that are similar to those found in general anxiety (Rutstein, 1997). Locate the distortion, confusion, or fear in each statement below (Rutstein & Morgan, 1996):

· Surely, people of color are not similar to me.

· I am vastly different from them in every way. Different means better.

· I will openly hang out with others who share my views. We will make a united block that looks good.

· I cannot have anyone think I am similar to people of color, because they will think I share the bad traits of people of color.

· I definitely belong to a separate and superior race.

IV. Improving Self-Understanding and Race Relations

Intergroup Contact

Whereas some forms of contact can spread prejudice, other forms of contact can reduce it. Social psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp define intergroup contact as "actual face-to-face interaction between members of clearly defined groups" (2000, p. 94). The intergroup contact model asserts that prejudice between ethnic and racial groups can be reduced through intergroup contact under optimal or positive conditions (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000). Important factors include the nature of the contact, the conditions under which the contact is made, and the groups making contact.

In their studies, Pettigrew and Tropp found that prejudice reduction occurs when a powerful authority figure sanctions the activity, when the groups have equal amounts of power, and when the groups are working toward common goals and have little competition between them (Pettigrrew & Tropp, 2000).

Review the conditions necessary for intergroup contact to result in prejudice reduction. Can you think of any examples from your personal experience that verify Pettigrew and Tropp's criteria? Consider your experiences in terms of authority, power, goals, and competition.

Researchers testing the intergroup contact theory with adults found that interactions meeting the optimal conditions described by Pettigrew and Tropp can reduce prejudice. They suggested, however, that various factors influence the degree of success. In their studies, contact between minority and majority members that met the optimal conditions (such as between Hispanic people and white people) did not yield as positive results as did contact between members of the same racial group (such as between Irish and Germans). Perhaps the power distance between groups matters.

Pettigrew and Tropp's finding raises the question of distance between different racial and ethnic groups. Much of what we have discussed in this module involves black and white groups. Why is that? American society seems to have a clear white/black dichotomy. A dichotomy is a division between two mutually exclusive groups (Merriam-Webster's, 1995). But we know that our society is multicultural. It is filled with individuals of many races and of mixed races.

Legal scholar Angelo Ancheta finds that race relations in the United States fall along two axes (Ancheta, 2006). One is the black/white axis, with its superior/inferior racist implications that we have discussed at length in this module. The other is the white/nonwhite axis (Ancheta, 2006, p. 63). Nonwhites include Asian Americans, Native Americans, Americans with Middle Eastern ancestry, and so on. Ancheta finds that this second axis contrasts whites, as insiders, with those who are seen as perpetual outsiders, regardless of their citizenship status. For example, third-generation Japanese Americans report that others continually tell them how well they speak English and ask them "Where do you come from?", refusing to accept that they come from, say, Los Angeles. The questioners always want to know the country of origin of the ancestors, indicating they view the third-generation citizens as outsiders.

Integrated Classrooms

The intergroup contact model supposes integrated classrooms to be effective in reducing prejudice. If children of different ethnic and racial groups have an opportunity to go to school together, they are more likely to unlearn prejudices and to learn to respect others who are different from them. However, as schools and neighborhoods resegregate, as they have in recent decades, many children will not have this opportunity (Pettigrew, 2004; Dillon, 2007).

Research conducted as part of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles finds that schools are resegregating (separating the races) at astonishing rates. On August 29, 2007, researchers issued a fairly lengthy (40-page) report to present their findings. In reading the report, you may focus on certain groups or the data shown in graphs, or you may scan the whole report and focus on the conclusions.

Reflect on your K–12 school experience. How diverse were the schools you attended? What have you learned from reading this report on conditions today?

Friendship across Racial Lines

Although having friends across racial lines is helpful and necessary for reducing prejudice, such friendships may not be sufficient to significantly eliminate racism. Author and cultural critic Benjamin DeMott holds that people are naïve to believe that individual friendships across racial lines will make all the inequalities between racial groups disappear (DeMott, 1995). In his book The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can't Think Straight about Race, DeMott describes how some whites believe that black and white friendship is the answer to America's enduring racial problems; DeMott calls this the black-white friendship tale. While acknowledging the importance of friendship between individuals of different ethnic and racial groups, DeMott argues that this makes up only one part of the solution. Friendship connections alone ignore or downplay the historical legacy of racism in America and the deep, institutional segregation and inequality that African Americans have endured for over 200 years.

Influence of the Media

The media also portray friendships across racial lines, and in doing so exercise the power to shape racial images.

Here are two scholarly articles on the power of the media. Locate these articles using the UMUC library databases. Explore one of these (or find a scholarly article on your own that addresses this topic), and reflect on the ways in which newspapers, photographs, and accounts of current events shape our racial views in the United States.

1. Zilber, J., & Niven, D. (2000). Stereotypes in the news: Media coverage of African-Americans in Congress. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 5, 32–49.

2. Berry, B. (2006). Friends for better or for worse: Interracial friendship in the United States as seen through wedding party photos. Demography, 43, 491–510.

Television and Movies

We often see depictions of friendships across racial lines in television advertisements and programs. The transmission of these images is especially effective because television reaches large audiences. On one level, many of the images are positive, but on another level, the images simplify race relations—and all human relations, for that matter—to primarily individual interactions between people. Positive friendship scenarios tend to neglect the anxiety, denial, and guilt that accompany racism, leaving poverty, prejudice, and privilege unaddressed.

Another powerful shaper of our racial views, movies also frequently show friendships across racial lines.

Have you seen any of these movies?

· Forrest Gump (1994)

· Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

· Lethal Weapon (1987)

· Pulp Fiction (1994)

· White Men Can't Jump (1992)

If so, what did you notice about their depictions of interracial friendships?

If you have not seen any of these movies, you might select one to watch. Each deals with friendship across racial lines. You can also watch a movie of your choice with the same theme. If you wish, you may search the Web for reputable reviews of the movie you chose and incorporate those comments into your personal reflection.

Reflect on the portrayal of friendship across racial lines in the movie you chose. Do you feel that the movie presents an authentic picture of racial differences and challenges? What does the movie include that you find relevant, and what is missing?

The Press

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the power of the press came to public attention. On August 30, 2006, newspapers published photographs showing hurricane survivors wading through deep water, clutching bags presumed to be full of food. In the activity below, investigate the outcry that came about as a result of the captions attached to these photographs.

Read the article  Hurricane Katrina and the "Two-Photo Controversy."  Reflect on the questions given in the "For Discussion" section at the bottom of the page. What captions might you give the photographs?

Learn About Yourself

Researchers at Project Implicit (Harvard University, University of Virginia, and the University of Washington, with connections to researchers from Sweden, Mexico, Germany, and Italy) are currently exploring the ways in which conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and biases inform our everyday thinking and acting (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). They are investigating implicit social cognition. Implicit means hidden or below conscious awareness, so implicit social cognition refers to hidden social knowledge we all possess.

Project Implicit has a virtual laboratory, and has been collecting data from visitors to its interactive Web site for nearly a decade. Its mission is to create a secure and engaging space where visitors can learn more about their own implicit biases by engaging in exercises designed to detect them.

The term implicit bias (also implicit associations) refers to the hidden prejudices we hold. The brain naturally recognizes physical differences among people and objects, but our ranking and valuing of those differences is entirely learned. Value judgments are generally deeply ingrained, and often lie beneath the surface of conscious thought. For example, we may not realize that we think of people from New York as "pushy" or women as "emotional."

Visitors to the Project Implicit Web site can delve into their own psychological preferences by engaging in anonymous exercises. These are called Implicit Association Tests. Like video games, they are fast paced and require you to view stimuli such as pictures and make very quick associations. By asking you to connect an adjective (e.g., "good" or "bad" or "friendly" or "unfriendly") with an object (e.g., man or woman, young person or old person), these tests uncover implicit biases or associations that you may not realize that you hold. You receive feedback almost immediately, and the data become part of a pool of data from people around the world, which are then are analyzed for the project.

Explore the many options on the Project Implicit Web site and complete an exercise of your choice. The Project Implicit home pageprovides statistics about the overall project. You can also look at relevant research papers, or go to a demonstration test.

After exploring the Web site and taking a Project Implicit test, what have you learned about bias? What have you learned about yourself?

V. Summary

In this module, we entered another very busy intersection of history and social science to study the transmission of race prejudice. We found that social scientists' views of race changed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the turn of the twentieth century, scientists accepted and endorsed racist ideologies, but discarded them within a few decades. They deemed prejudice irrational and, after more investigation, concluded that it was pathological as well.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, white sociologist Gordon Parks suggested a race relations cycle in which prejudice was a natural outcome of competition in groups assimilating to American life. Parks' model fairly well described the experience of European immigrants grafting onto the dominant white culture of the United States. But his model left out African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, and by doing so did not investigate those who suffered the most from the effects of prejudice.

E. Franklin Frazier, an African American sociologist, offered a different and convincing view that the "natural" process of prejudice did grave damage to African Americans who had already been hurt by slavery and discrimination. Unfortunately, he accepted prevailing views that black matriarchal families and black social practices were pathological, so in the end, he seemed to go too far in his condemnation of his own culture.

In the 1950s, psychologist Gordon Allport offered a wide-ranging theory about prejudice with so many topics identified as causal factors that he admitted it took him years to organize the table of contents of his book on prejudice. The vastness of the topic dramatically increased in the following decades. Since the 1970s, immigration to the United States from other parts of the world has increased, and new sensibilities about Asian Americans and Native Americans have expanded the topic of prejudice from a black/white concern into a rainbow of issues.

We looked at research findings on how children acquire prejudice and found prejudice in place and operating even in young children, with the exclusion of playmates in school. We noticed the complexities involved with studying children and the effects that experimenters have on the outcomes of their carefully planned laboratory experiments.

We also examined how race prejudice is learned, maintained, and transmitted through denial, rationalization, and justification. One of the ways in which we pick up prejudice and other racial ideas is through associations and contact with others who share like ideas about race and ethnicity. Human beings have a tendency to function within social and cultural groups. These groups act as a mechanism for learning, maintaining, and transmitting racial ideas and practices.

We investigated the transmission of racial images and messages to a large audience. We also looked at depictions of friendships that cross racial borders. Messages hidden in cross-racial friendship scenarios transmit images that are positive on one level, but that greatly simplify the issue of race relations on another.

We investigated the intergroup contact theory, which maintains that some forms of contact spread prejudice, whereas other forms reduce it. The way in which the contact affects prejudice depends on the nature of the contact, the conditions under which the contact takes place, and the groups making the contact. We found that positive experiences between different groups were important in reducing levels of implicit (hidden) bias. Justification theory explains how individuals rationalize racism so as to maintain the status quo and present it as desirable.

The module ended by discussing new efforts to uncover bias. The Project Implicit Web site has collected data from around the world on implicit social cognition, helping us to understand how biases operate and how they inform our behavior. Researchers are working to examine the implicit nature of bias, as well as the ways in which it can be reduced. The Project Implicit team has noted that certain kinds of experiences with other groups can be important predictors of implicit and explicit bias levels.

Seven or eight decades of research on prejudice have left us at times with many more questions than answers. However, current findings and projects offer us hope that prejudice can be unlearned as successfully as it is learned.

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