Racism And Social Psychology Essay

Can Psychology Explain Racism? Jamal Saeed Minnesota State University, Mankato

Racism is one of the biggest problem we face today in the modern world. The concept of race comes from the belief that biology of different groups is different. This belief leads to a lot of problems like, stereotypes, social dominance of one group over the other and even wars among the groups. Human history is full of examples of the destructive nature of racism and sadly even today most people experience racism every day. Racism has been defined in several ways, but three features of these definitions are most significant. Racism is a way to dominant and control the outcomes of another

The branch that deals with interaction of people in an environment is called social psychology. Racism is a social issue and it is a concept that has been generated by people for social politics. Psychologist started to research about racism after the genocide of Jews during World War 2. They started to think about how someone can kill so many people without showing any remorse at all. They researched for decades came up with a lot of theories, but nothing could explain fully why racism exists. Kevin Durrheim And John Dixon came up with a solution in their paper “Studying talk and embodied practices: Towards a psychology of materiality of ‘race relations” After providing valuable critiques of selective anti-realism of discursive approaches to racism, these author argued that “an adequate social psychology of racism must focus on the embodied and located everyday practices (and talk about such) which bring ‘race’ into being”. Their main point was instead of trying to focus on how people can commit genocide we should focus on everyday practices and how every individual person deals with a person of another group. They went to South Africa and studied how the white and black beach goers interact with each other. They discovered that people have unconscious biases which causes them to act negatively towards each