Racism
Racism
Racism is based on the belief that one race is superior to another. It includes discrimination and exclusion against those who are of different ethnic origin in a community. In Euro-US racism is particularly prevalent against those who have a different skin colour. This is thought to be based on the slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the formation of the British empire. Racism continues in the West today, for example, when minorities of Asian and African origin immigrated to the UK during the 1950s and 1960s. Physical attacks, harassment, discrimination in health, employment and housing are symptomatic of racism. People often create stereotypes of ethnic groups which are often misguided and untrue. Racism was also a devastating part of Nazi Germany's Fascist regime during the Second World War when Jews, gypsies, Slavs and other non-Arian races were exterminated or powerfully discriminated against. Most racist individuals tend nowadays, according to the Commission for Racial Equality, to be from the working class, the elderly and the least well-educated members of society. Younger members of society are more open minded about racial differences, possibly because they have grown up in a multi-ethnic society.
One account of racism suggests that it is derived from the theory usually known as the survival of the fittest. This suggests that the in-group will survive if other members act unselfishly and co-operatively to help other members to breed through sharing food and dwelling places. If their kin survive then their genes will be passed on to the next generation. Van den Berghe suggests that in a multi-ethnic nation these feelings of kinship survive among members of the same ethnic group. However the large ethnic groups that live in our society today do not resemble the small kin groups on which the theory was based. Also 85 per cent of genetic variation between racial groups occurs between individuals within the same population so that genetic variation would be maintained even though certain members of a tribe perished. Survival of the genes would be maintained throughout the population at large.
Racism today appears to depend on the stereotypes many people form of minority groups. Stereotypes associated certain traits and tendencies to different minority groups. But these are often biased and inadequate. Stereotypes focus on only a few of the alleged characteristics and ignore variations and diversity. What would be better would be to concentrate on the specific attributes and abilities of each individual. Whereas some black people carry out manual work with little mental stimulation, other black people, such as Diane Abbott the black MP and Stuart Hall who won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, have academic abilities which many white people fail to achieve.
Nevertheless, many people do carry stereotypes of ethnic groups which determine their attitude as Snyder and Uranowitz (1978) have pointed out. Many people carry in their minds an image of a typical member of a racial group. Behaviour of an occasional occurrence can predict stereotypes. For example,Asians are frequently discriminated against by Britons for the smell they make in the neighbourhood when cooking their curries.
Duncan (1976) demonstrated this when he showed North American students a videotape of a heated debate between two men in which one man gave the other a push or a shove. In one version both men were white, in the second both men were black and in two there was one black man and one white man. The students were found to describe the push as violent when it was given by a black man and only"fooling around" when given by a white man. This result suggests that the stereotype held by the students of the black man includes violence. This indicates that a characteristic present in an occasional form in a minority group is projected as a characteristic of the group as a whole.
AfroAmericans are frequently taller and have better muscular development than Americans who can trace their origins from European descendants. One has only to look at the start of the 100m race at the Olympics athletic event or to consider the number of white men who have been world heavyweight boxing champions to see this. Physiologically African races have stronger bone development and are often taller than white people. White people may feel insignificant and fearful when surrounded by taller, better developed black people, who reputedly have greater sexual potency. This encourages the white people to take refuge and concentrate on their more negative stereotypes.
Psychodynamics may also play a part in racism in what Adorno et al.(1950) described as the authoritarian personality which has its roots in childhood. A very harsh upbringing with very strict parents leads people into learning to submit to authority and to fear having to assert themselves. The authoritarian personality makes the Fascist movement with its profound anti-semitism and its antagonism to Jews and black migrants particularly attractive. Such authoritarian personalities fear having to assert themselves and readily submit to authorities which substitute for their parents. Hostility which could never be directed towards the parents becomes projected onto other people such as minority ethnic groups which the Nazis targeted. Authoritarian personalities have the view that social norms must be rigidly adhered to.
However, this does not suggest that the entire Nazi party was composed of authoritarian personalities. But it does suggest to some people that the anti-semitism of the Nazi party, which was strong and punishing, was particularly attractive because of their upbringing and personality. Billig(1978) studies the National Front for an analysis of its social psychology. This study included 11 interviews with party members but only one of them was judged to have an authoritarian personality. Pettigrew (1958) also studied racism and he found that students in South Africa were more prejudiced against black people than those in North America but they were not more authoritarian. Students in the southern states of America were also more racist than those in the northern states. There was some evidence to suggest that the more racist the community the more people there were with authoritarian personalities.
Elliot (1992) claims that some racists derive strong "unconscious pleasure" by discriminating against others but their discrimination is often attributed to being a "good citizen" or "protecting the EuroAmerican way of life". This unconscious pleasure is in projecting painful parts of the self, especially those acquired during childhood, onto minority groups who can then be attacked. The humiliations of childhood are therefore reversed.
Sherif and Sherif (1969) believed that competition for resources, such as employment, may be the subjective source of intergroup conflict. They developed a theory known as the realistic group conflict theory and illustrated this with their field experiments conducted at a summer camp for psychologically well balanced 11- to 12-year-old American boys. The boys were divided into two groups which cut across previous friendship bonds the boys had formed. At first the boys were kept to their own group and were involved with the usual summer camp activities. During this time the boys developed into a socially compact in-group, each with its own rituals and giving themselves special names. Then the two groups were brought together in competition and during this time strong group cohesion became apparent with strong positive connections to the in-group and negative ones to the out-group.
Sherif and Sherif were able to show that the conflicts which emerged during the competitions arranged between the two groups of boys were also characteristic of racial discrimination and intergroup hostility between minority groups and the local population. Sherif and Sherif also point out that racism in real life involves many more aspects, such as power struggles,inaccurate stereotypes, inequalities in employment and accommodation than were encountered during the summer camp experiment. But the experiment did show a link between individual psychology and intergroup hostility.
Tajfel et al. (1981) investigated the psychological consequences of in-group formation. Belonging to a group means living and acting like a group member. This was described as intergroup behaviour. In the summer camp experiment the boys were allowed first of all to make friends acting as individuals or enacting interpersonal behaviour. But when they were split up into two groups, they soon developed intergroup behaviour. In this they focused on similarities between one another and stereotyping all members of the out-group in a negative way. The out-group then seemed to be made up of people with different attributes and idiosyncrasies to their own.
Tajfel's minimal group experiments, where there was no intergroup behaviour,no history of group membership and no contact with others belonging to the same group, still showed clear signs of preference for the in-group and discrimination towards the out-group.
In 1969, Jensen published an article in which he reviewed all the literature which compared IQ scores from black and white people. The basic findings were that AfroAmericans scored 15 IQ points below native white Americans. Jensen believed that genetic factors were strongly implicated, yet only 7 per cent of all human genetic variation is between races. Kamin (1976), on the other hand,believed that the difference in IQ scores was attributable to different environmental factors between the two groups. Environment includes the sum total of stimuli to which an individual responds from conception to death. Many AfroAmericans at that time were living in impoverished environments with continuing prejudice and discrimination. They did not enjoy the stimulating environment which white Americans had. Also many of the questions in the IQ test related to the typical American way of life of which the AfroAmericans might be unaware.
Another factor which shows that environment is vital is that when AfroAmerican babies are adopted by white parents with above average incomes and intelligence they score more than 15 points higher in intelligence tests than underprivileged black children raised by their biological parents (Scarr and Weinberg, 1976). Another study, this time of illegitimate children fathered by either AfroAmericans or white Americans in Germany at the end of the Second World War, found no difference in IQ between the two groups. As all the children were brought up by German mothers of similar social standing this suggests the environment is the major determinant in racial IQ differences (Eyferth et al.,1960).
Some sociobiologists have argued that aggression and dominance may be influenced by our biological and evolutionary inheritance. The symbolic process,which is part of the way we come to describe our world, can be divided up into influences we derive from society and during our childhood. So living in a society which has strong overtones of racism may affect our own attitudes towards ethnic minorities. Our parents and siblings may be racist and this will also influence our own attitudes developing during childhood by communication from one generation to another. We may decide that we have some antagonism towards ethnic minorities based on our misplaced and incorrect stereotypes.
In essence the different theories of racism developed by social psychologists show us that it is primarily ill conceived and incorrectly held stereotypes that are responsible for racism. The occasional behaviour of members of different ethnic groups can lead to stereotypes but it is important not to generalise to all members of the group. The limited capacity of the human mind to take into account individual features of members of minority groups can be the cause of racism. It is also important to recognise that environment can play an integral role in the development of individual personality. Many ethnic groups do not have the advantage of adequate housing and live in socially deprived areas. Their children are brought up without the intellectually stimulating environment many native people take for granted.
We should consider instead the number of professional people from ethnic groups who overcome these disadvantages and become recognised within their chosen professions. Integration between ethnic groups and the native population would help people to avoid falling into the in-group, out-group mentality. Finally we should bear in mind the fact that all people regardless of race share a common evolutionary history.
Dilys Wells
References
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswick E., Levinson D.J. and Sandford, R.N. (1950), The Authoritarian Personality, Harper and Row, New York, NY.Billig,M. (1978), Fascists: A Social Psychological Investigation of the National Front, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, London.Duncan, B.L. (1976),"Differential social perception and attributes of intergroup violence:testing the lower limits of stereotyping of blacks", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 34, pp. 590-8.Elliot, A.(1992), Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, Basil Blackwell,Oxford.Eyferth, K., Brandt, U. and Wolfgang, H. (1960), Farbiger Kinder in Deutschland, Juventa 484, Munich.Jensen, A.R. (1969), "The nature of the black-white difference on various psychometric tests: Spearman's hypothesis", The Behaviour and Brain Sciences, Vol. 8, pp. 193-263.Kamin, L.J. (1976), "Heredity, intelligence, politics and psychology",in Block, N.J. and Dworkin, G. (Eds), The IQ Controversy, Pantheon, New York, NY.Pettigrew, T.F. (1958), "Personality and socio-cultural factors in intergroup attitudes: A cross national comparison", Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 2, pp. 29-42.Scarr, S. and Weinberg, R.A.(1976), "IQ test performance of black children adopted by white families", American Psychologist, Vol. 31, pp. 726-39.Sherif, M. and Sherif,C. (1969), Social Psychology, Harper and Row, New York, NY.Snyder,M. and Uranowitz, S.W. (1978), "Reconstructing the past: some cognitive consequences of person perception", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 36, pp. 941-50.Tajfel et al. (1981).
