scholarly journals Making Advantaged Racial Groups Care About Inequality: Intergroup Contact as a Route to Psychological Investment

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 194-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda R. Tropp ◽  
Fiona Kate Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Personal Relevance ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The World ◽  
Racial Lines

Racial inequality remains an objective reality in the United States and around the world, yet members of advantaged racial groups often deny or minimize its existence. Although we have well-developed theories to explain why advantaged racial groups would be motivated to deny or minimize inequality, at present we know relatively little about why Whites and other advantaged racial groups might be willing to acknowledge or care about racial inequality. In this article, we propose that contact between racial groups offers one of the most promising pathways to advance these outcomes. We review established and emerging research literature suggesting that contact contributes to these outcomes by encouraging members of advantaged racial groups to become psychologically invested in the perspectives, experiences, and welfare of members of disadvantaged racial groups. We propose that psychological processes such as building empathy, enhancing personal relevance, and humanizing other people can facilitate the extent to which contact leads to greater psychological investment in other racial groups. We conclude by discussing several factors that may serve as obstacles to psychological investment across racial lines and the relevance of contact and establishing connections between racial groups in light of current social divisions and racial tensions.

Rethinking Racial Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Lines

American society continues to be characterized by deep racial inequality that is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. What does justice demand in response? In this book, Andrew Valls argues that justice demands quite a lot—the United States has yet to fully reckon with its racial past, or to confront its ongoing legacies. Valls argues that liberal values and principles have far-reaching implications in the context of the deep injustices along racial lines in American society. In successive chapters, the book takes on such controversial issues as reparations, memorialization, the fate of black institutions and communities, affirmative action, residential segregation, the relation between racial inequality and the criminal justice system, and the intersection of race and public schools. In all of these contexts, Valls argues that liberal values of liberty and equality require profound changes in public policy and institutional arrangements in order to advance the cause of racial equality. Racial inequality will not go away on its own, Valls argues, and past and present injustices create an obligation to address it. But we must rethink some of the fundamental assumptions that shape mainstream approaches to the problem, particularly those that rely on integration as the primary route to racial equality.

The Myth of the Latin American Race Monolith: Notes for Future Comparative Research on Racial Inequality in the Americas

2021 ◽  
pp. 003464462199600
Author(s):  
Diego Ayala-McCormick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Census Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unemployment Rates ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Racial Lines

It has become common to compare racial inequality in the United States with a “Latin American” pattern of racial inequality in which egalitarian racial ideologies mask stark socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines. However, relatively few comparative studies exist attempting to analyze variations in degrees of racial inequality in the Americas. To stimulate further research in this area, the following study analyzes census data on racial inequality in unemployment rates, educational attainment, homeownership rates, and income in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The results suggest that while Brazil is similar to the United States in displaying large levels of racial inequality in the areas measured, Cuba and Puerto Rico display significantly lower levels of racial inequality and Colombia falls in between, undermining conceptions of a monolithic Latin American racial system.

scholarly journals Developmental Origins of Anti-Black Bias in White US Children: Exposure to and Beliefs about Racial Inequality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Rizzo ◽  
Tobias Britton ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Developmental Origins ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Racial Inequalities

Anti-Black racism remains a pervasive crisis in the United States today. Racist social systems are rooted in prejudicial beliefs that reinforce and perpetuate racial inequalities. These beliefs have their developmental origins in early childhood and are difficult to change once entrenched in adolescence and adulthood. What causes children to form prejudicial beliefs and racial biases—and what steps can be taken to preempt them from forming—remain open questions. Here we show that children’s exposure to and beliefs about racial inequalities predict the formation of anti-Black biases in a sample of 712 White children (4-8 years) living across the United States. Drawing from constructivist theories in developmental science, we outline a novel account of the emergence of racial bias in early childhood: As children observe racial inequalities in the world around them, they develop beliefs about the causal factors underlying those inequalities. Children who believe that inequalities reflect the inherent superiority/inferiority of racial groups develop biases that perpetuate this worldview, whereas those who recognize the extrinsic causes of racial inequalities develop attitudes geared towards rectification. Our results demonstrate the importance of early intervention to disrupt problematic beliefs before they emerge and highlight children’s awareness of structural racism as an important target for anti-racist intervention.

scholarly journals Editorial

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. vii-xv
Author(s):  
Ovamir Anjum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
College Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Education History ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Financial Return ◽  
The World ◽  
Health Related

Historical thinking, a necessary tool for us to make sense of an increasinglycomplex world, is on a path of decline across the world. In a recent NewYorker article entitled “The Decline of Historical Thinking” (February 4,2019), Eric Alterman, an English Professor at CUNY and a public intellectual,bemoaned the nosedive that enrollment in history departments hastaken in universities across the United States. For the past decade, historyhas been declining more rapidly than any other major and across allethnic and racial groups, even as more and more students attend college.The steep decline in history graduates (about a third!) becomes especiallyvisible after 2011, presumably in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisiswhen students and parents at the lower rungs of society began to worryabout the financial return of investment in a college education. History isthe top loser, but it is not the only one; in fact, nearly the same rate of declineis evident in other humanities fields including area studies, languages,philosophy, and, to a slightly lesser extent, social sciences (political science,anthropology, sociology, IR, education). The winners, not surprisingly, areSTEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), particularly computerscience and health related majors.1 This trend is not a great surprise initself. What is unexpected, however, is that the decline is not uniform. Inelite universities in the United States, the humanities majors are thriving;history remains among the top declared majors at Yale, for instance. Theeducated elite, in other words, are becoming systematically differentiatedfrom the vast majority of people (“the demos”) in a powerful democracy,one that still sets intellectual and political trends in the world, and one ...

An International Perspective on Speech-Language Pathology Assistants

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Ostergren ◽  
Sara M. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
World Health ◽  
Policy Statement ◽  
Speech Language Pathology ◽  
The World ◽  
Language Pathology

In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank highlighted several pressing concerns in the area of service provision to individuals with disabilities, including a global shortage of rehabilitation personnel. The use of mid-level workers was recommended as one strategy for improving human resource capacity in this area. In the United States, speech-language pathology assistants (SLPAs) are one type of mid-level worker that has received recent attention. The American Speech-Language and Hearing Association (ASHA) updated its policy statement on SLPAs in 2013 and also implemented a voluntary affiliation for assistants in 2011. Unfortunately, a paucity of research exists in the United States on this topic. Internationally, however, researchers have reported on the topic of assistants in the field of speech-language pathology. This manuscript serves as an integrative review of the research literature on the topic of assistants in the field of speech-language pathology from an international perspective, including information on the effectiveness of assistants in service provision, important elements related to their training and supervision, opinions from supervisors on this topic, and novel extensions of assistant services to areas such as cross-disciplinary tasks and telerehabilitation.

Anticipating the Postwar World

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-179
Author(s):  
Robert L. McLaughlin ◽  
Sally E. Parry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Special Interests ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Return Home

Social anxieties about the war and about what it was doing to the country permeated America. What would happen when the war was over? The plays at the end of the war ask what kind of country the United States will be after the war is won, what form postwar democracy will take, and what the county's relationship with the rest of the world what will be. Taken together, the plays produced near and just after the end of the war spend little time celebrating the Allies' victory. Rather, they look at the challenges that returning servicemen will face in trying to reestablish family relationships and trying to heal from psychological wounds. They look at the difficulties families will face when their serviceman doesn't return home. They look at how those on the home front have had to remake their lives in ways that the returning serviceman will have trouble recognizing. They look at how old prejudices will create new social divisions as black and Jewish servicemen return home. They look at how selfish special interests, political naivete, and sheer love of power may undermine the democratic cause for which the nation had fought the war. While much of the country's popular culture was ringing victory bells, along Broadway, many playwrights were sounding alarms.

scholarly journals “Dear White People Vol. 2”: Social networking as an enforcing tool for racial inequality

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Antonio Gallardo Gracia
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
The United States ◽  
White People ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Caucasian Students ◽  
Racial Lines

Recently, social networking sites have been used as a means of spreading an alarming narrative under the premise of freedom of speech, through enraging, provocative and harmful messages. Some of them, posted by powerful and influential people, have empowered a group of individuals who have spoken up and expressed their approval of said messages through increasingly harsher language, as well as violent actions. Some of them were racist in tone, and increasingly widespread on several social media platforms, such as Twitter, where the issue of racial inequality fuels increasing division and hatred. Dear White People is a Netflix series, based on a 2014 film of the same title, depicting Winchester University, an ethnically diverse college in the United States of America, where a conflict along racial lines erupts. At the same University, Samantha White, a junior Media Studies major, begins hosting a radio show called “Dear White People”, addressed to Caucasian students in order to make them aware of what Blackness means in a judgmental, predominantly white society. The aim of this article is to present how influential social networking is in society by using the example of Dear White People Vol. 2, as well as to illustrate how the issue of racism increases in magnitude through a narrative that spreads and encourages individuals to take verbal and physical actions against the black minority.

EMBEDDING THE COLOR LINE: The Accumulation of Racial Advantage and the Disaccumulation of Opportunity in Post-Civil Rights America

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Brown ◽  
David Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This article investigates why deeply entrenched racial inequality persists into the post-civil rights era in the United States. It challenges individual-level explanations that assume persistent racial inequality is the result of either White bigotry, which is diminishing, or the failure of Blacks to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. We propose an alternative explanation for durable racial inequality. Contemporary color lines, we argue, result from the cumulative effect of racial discrimination and exclusion, a process in which Whites accumulate racial advantages to the detriment of African Americans and Latinos. These cumulative inequalities are produced and sustained by competition between racial groups to acquire and control jobs and other resources, and by institutional practices and public policies. Individual choice in the form of intentional racism has little to do with the persistence of racial inequality. Our analysis suggests that Americans' current understanding of the concept of equality of opportunity is out of sync with the realities of durable racial inequality, and needs to be revised.

scholarly journals THEMES AND VARIATIONS

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-270
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dawson ◽  
Lawrence D. Bobo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Children Of Immigrants ◽  
European Part ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
The World ◽  
Immigration Politics

As we write this introduction, Senator Barack Obama, son of an African immigrant to the United States, is in the middle of a fierce fight to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for president. Obama's candidacy brings into stark relief the fluid and evolving status of immigrants of color, regardless of either the outcome of the electoral battle or what one might think of the senator and his politics. Further, the Obama campaign is illuminating the complex and conflicted ways that racial and immigration politics intersect. Questions such as how our understandings of the constitution of racial groups are refigured, how the formation of arguably new racial groups proceeds, and what the role of racial and ethnic conflict and resentment are have all come into play during the course of the Democratic Party's contest. Obama's life story is a new one, in that it is the story of a descendent of an immigrant from a non-European part of the world, but the mythology of his story is also a very familiar one—the children of immigrants who take advantage of the opportunities available in this nation overcome large obstacles, and succeed in previously unimaginable ways.

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