Slide presentation for PSY 375

1. PSY 375: Lifespan Development
Race & Prejudice
Week 11

2. Spotlight on: Race
Race is a fiction that’s real.
Race is a social construction rather than a biological fact.
Physical anthropology research shows there is just as much diversity within ‘racial
groups’ as there is between ‘racial groups’
But racial difference continues to play a huge role in social life -- in who has
power (or access to resources)
Racial categories have been created by white Europeans and North Americans
and used to justify colonialism, slavery, genocide, murder, and theft of
cultures.
Racial categories artificially emphasize relatively small eternal physical differences
among people and open up space for the creation of false notions of mental,
emotional, and intellectual differences as well.

3. Racism 101
• Power
– Access to resources and participation in society
• Prejudice
– Beliefs, attitudes, and actions based on stereotypes
Racism = Prejudice + Power
or
Racism = racial prejudice plus institutional and systemic
power to dominate, exclude, discriminate against or
abuse targeted groups of people based on race.

4. Who benefits from racism?
Who suffers because of it?

5. • Agent / dominant group
(in U.S. and Europe, as well as other places like sites of colonization)
people of European descent
• Target / oppressed group
people of color = Latinx, Asian, Black,
Middle Eastern, and Indigenous people

6. Individual vs. Institutional Racism
• Institutional/Structural/Systemic racism is that
which, covertly or overtly, resides in the policies,
procedures, operations and culture of public or
private institutions - reinforcing individual prejudices
and being reinforced by them in turn.
• Whereas individual racism is the expression of
personal prejudice, institutional racism is the
expression of a whole organization's racist practice
and culture.

7. From our Psychology Dept hallway…
7

8. Non-Western
Cultures
Western
European
Science
We will study you from
our point of view.
You need
to come around
to our way of thinking.

9. • Scheurich & Young (1997) call this dynamic
“epistemological racism,”
• our current range of research
epistemologies—positivism to
postmodernisms/ poststructuralisms—arise
out of the social history and culture of the
dominant race,
• That these epistemologies logically reflect
and reinforce that social history and that racial
group (while excluding the epistemologies of
other races/cultures).
• Consequently, there are inevitably negative
results for people of color in general and
scholars of color in particular.
• Scheurich & Young (1997) call this dynamic
“epistemological racism,”
• our current range of research
epistemologies—positivism to
postmodernisms/ poststructuralisms—arise
out of the social history and culture of the
dominant race,
• That these epistemologies logically reflect
and reinforce that social history and that racial
group (while excluding the epistemologies of
other races/cultures).
• Consequently, there are inevitably negative
results for people of color in general and
scholars of color in particular.

10. Bias permeates research (and society)

11. Not Like Me = Bad
Hamlin et al., 2013
(article is on Blackboard)

12. Race in Schools
• Effects of hegemonic whiteness (next slide)
• Black students are three times more likely to
be suspended or expelled than their white
peers, according to the U.S. Department of
Education
• More than half of the nation’s schoolchildren
are in racially concentrated districts, where
over 75% of students are either white or
nonwhite

14. Priest et al. (2018)
(article on Blackboard)