During a discussion about social identity theory, someone asked how race functioned as an identity. Social belief structure is defined by Hogg as, “people’s beliefs about the nature of intergroup relations and their assessment of the validity and effectiveness of different strategies to achieve or maintain positive intergroup distinctiveness,” meaning there is an emphasis on maintaining a group identity that is distinct from other groups, creating a clear “us” “them” dynamic. The five components of social identity theory—group’s social status, stability, legitimacy, permeability, and achievability—are all crucial in maintaining the structures of race and racism.
identity
Seeing Race and Feeling Shame: The rest of the story
In their online publication, “Seeing Race and Seeming Racist? Whites Go out of Their Way to Avoid Talking About Race,” the American Psychological Association (I mysteriously could not find an exact author) posits that, in attempt to avoid drawing negative feelings toward themselves, white people often avoid talking about race, even when it is clearly relevant to the situation. In their attempts to be culturally sensitive, however, people who avoid talking about race are often, as a result of their avoidance, perceived negatively.
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First Week of Class – Reaction to Class Activity
One activity that I appreciated the first week of class was when we each wrote down our different social identities on note cards, mixed up the cards and redistributed them, and then had to say why or why not we thought the card we each received would be in our in-group or out-group. I found this interesting because it made me think about how arbitrary these social identities such as religion, sexual orientation, and disability status in showing how compatible people could be and what values they have in common.
White Identity Lost
Black identity is a topic that is discussed and recognized everyday in our contemporary racism class. They are grouped and recognized as a separate ethnicity in which they promote the distinction between white and black. It never really occurred to me until I read this quote by Lipsitz, that whites have lost their individual ethnic identity.
“Urban renewal helped construct a new “white” identity in the suburbs by helping to destroy ethnically specific European American urban inner-city neighborhoods.”
Accessibility & Fit
After reading this week’s articles what really stood out to me was the Hogg article on Social Identity Theory. In this article Hogg talked about the idea of groups and how individuals are placed or fit into their so called groups. In my opinion the most interesting part of this was what Hogg called accessibility and fit, what identities we find most and least important. In other words accessibility and fit is the system of how we rank and use our many identities or groups.
Where Do We Start?
During our class this Thursday we briefly touched on the impact of both laws and public opinion on human behavior with particular concern to attitudes about racial issues. In Rebecca Kook’s (1998) article The Shifting Status of African Americans in the American Collective Identity, she traces the development of the African-American identity in America through landmark events in our history driven almost entirely by public opinion. As her article makes painfully obvious, most positive progress, unfortunately, has only come in the past 50-60 years. The preceding decades were marred with a series of terrible injustices that were condoned and perpetuated by an American society that was intolerant, ignorant, apathetic and for the most part overtly racist.
Is “Coming Out” beneficial to homosexual black men?
In class we have been heavily discussing stereotypes the past couple of weeks and although we have not limited the scope of our discussion to stigmatized groups, it seems those with the most salient stigmatizations inevitable surface in our discussions. This led me to wonder about people who had more than one stigmatized identity, and more specifically, identities that were in conflict with each other. The group I eventually settled on was homosexual black men. This group interested me because they had two stigmatized identities, but one could be hidden while the other was always present and for the majority of black males, clearly in conflict with the other. I was able to find two solid studies to explore my questions about this double stigmatized group, Good Cake by Tiffany Yvette Christian and Racial Differences in Social Support and Mental Health in Men with HIV Infection by D.G. Ostrow.
Read moreIs “Coming Out” beneficial to homosexual black men?