social categorization – Page 2 – Contemporary Racism

The Significance of Social Cognition in Determining Racial Ideology

02/24/2016 by Anna Robinson

As I read the section entitled “The Birth and Death of Slavery” in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the key role social cognition played in creating racial ideologies became abundantly clear. As Alexander explains in her historical analysis of the creation of race in colonial America, a fledgling country had certain capitalist needs for an increase in land and an increase in labor; in order for these …

Supremacy and Privilege: The Insidious Consequences of Language

12/01/202002/24/2016 by Becky Goodman

The social constructs that define our reality seem so natural and organic it is as if they were created along with the four elements. But we know that things like race and gender were built by people in order to create a hierarchal society, so how do we begin to deconstruct the categories we both rely on and often cannot see? I suggest that the first step to deconstruction is changing how we describe our …

Is Prejudice Inevitable?

01/11/201702/17/2014 by Ave.MariaLewis

After reading the Devine article I became increasingly curious with the idea of how inevitable prejudice and racial stereotyping really is in today’s society. In Devine’s article she states “Inhibiting stereotype-congruent or prejudice-like responses and intentionally replacing them with nonprejudiced responses can be likened to be the breaking of a bad habit” (Devine, P.G. 1989). There are many people who are under the notion that we live in post racial society; but as we have …

The Majority vs. Minority vs. Other Minority Race (pun intended)

05/19/201402/03/2014 by AmandaRG

A friend shared another blog with me recently, called Black Girl Dangerous, that I believe has a lot of posts and discussions related to this class. One post (the link is at the bottom) called “Broke on Broke Crime: On Black and Brown Living and Unity,” written by Kitzia Esteva-Martinez, discusses her personal experience being mugged at gun-point by three young boys in her neighborhood. Kitzia identifies as Latina and identified the three boys as Black in …

True Match Foundations: The Link Between Ethnicity and Foundation

08/12/201206/17/2012 by nashkrod

L’Oreal has released a series of commercials that make me a little uncomfortable. The commercials are for L’Oreal’s True Match foundations which are supposed to “precisely match your skin’s tone and texture.” The commercials feature a few celebrities: Beyonce Knowles (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc50e02zDt8&feature=BFa&list=PLF68B3695EF7533DC), Jennifer Lopez (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njIKU3sZy4E&feature=BFa&list=PLF68B3695EF7533DC), and Aimee Mullins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GbUTjQdaY&feature=BFa&list=PLF68B3695EF7533DC). The script for each commercial is the same. They start with “There’s a story behind my skin. It’s a mosaic of all the faces before it. My …

How can we fix it?

08/12/201202/13/2012 by AbbeyRab

This week in class we discussed psychological reasonings behind prejudice and racism. Through a couple readings we discovered that humans categorize others through an implicit automatic mechanism. Without even realizing that we are doing so, we are judging a person within seconds of looking at them, placing them into pre-made categories that society helped us create throughout our lives. Stereotypes form these social categories, which then become further reinforced whenever we believe that we witness a person fulfilling a stereotype. On the bright side, this research shows that humans are not deliberately placing others in categories, or more specifically, whites are not deliberately demeaning blacks and other minorities as “less than” them. However, this psychological mechanism implies that human’s brains are hard-wired to act this way, and once there categories are formed, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Group Identity and Assimilation

08/12/201202/13/2012 by Michela

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.

But Cleopatra was Beautiful!

08/12/201202/05/2012 by Alexis

I had a professor once who asked the class to close their eyes and envision the “perfect mate”. He then went around the room asking each student to describe their “dream” mate and marked it on the board. After every one was finished describing their vision he proceeded to explain to the class that every time he does this exercise, the “ideal” ends up being Caucasian, taller, blue eyes and light hair. While there were some votes for dark hair and eyes, his statement held true and the Caucasian, taller, blue eyes and light hair ideal won out; even with the black students. The professor then went about explaining American WASP culture and how deep its roots really delve. Tatum, 2007/1997, hit on this when on page 124, a student, once discovering that Cleopatra was black, exclaimed; “But Cleopatra was beautiful!”. Why is it that within our society we have been programmed to believe that being black, or “of color” (“of color” always makes me laugh; are all white people really “white” and void of color somehow pristine and pure?), is so unworthy of the word beauty?

Stereotypes as a Cognitive Tool

05/19/201407/08/2011 by Jordan

I found the findings of the article “Stereotypes as Energy-Saving Devices: A Peek Inside the Cognitive Toolbox” by Macrae, et. al incredibly depressing. The researchers’ studies on both implicitly and explicitly presented stereotype cues revealed that stereotypes, like any kind of schema, save cognitive energy. Rather than analyzing the different traits of a new person, we subconsciously label them as part of a group. That way, we can instead use cognition to process what they are saying, or something else that is going on in the environment. Physical traits such as ace, gender, and disability status obviously stand out as markers about what group somebody belongs, and we make judgments based on our preconceived notions of these groups. Our brains do this automatically; without meaning to.

Stereotypes as Energy-Saving Devices

05/19/201402/07/2011 by KristinK

After reading the article Stereotypes as Energy-Saving Devices: A Peek Inside the Cognitive Toolbox, I have thought a lot about how stereotypes are formed. According to the article we stereotype automatically without being conscious of what we are doing. It makes sense that we put people into certain schema’s, we do it with everything else however it is much more problematic to stereotype or put people into a schema than it is for us to look at a desk chair and a couch and say they are both seats.