Pehrson, S., & Leach, C. W. (2012). Beyond ‘old’ and ‘new’: For a social psychology of racism. In J. Dixon & M. Levine (Eds.), Beyond prejudice: Extending the social psychology of conflict, inequality and social change (pp. 120–138). Cambridge University Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-08867-006
Abstract
The notion of modern racism expands the conceptualization of racism beyond theories about biological hierarchies to a broader construct that allows for forms of racism that do not involve such theories. This expansion is justified by drawing on the concept of prejudice. We make two related criticisms of this characterization of contemporary racism. First, we take issue with the assumption that racism in the past (that is, before the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s) always involved claims of biological superiority and inferiority, and argue that there is therefore nothing new about forms of racism in which such claims are absent. Attempts to draw a dichotomy between new and old forms of racism are further complicated by the persistence of supposedly antiquated racist representations. Second, we suggest that conceptualizing racism as prejudice has led psychologists to neglect the particularity of racism as an ideological phenomenon. We advance an alternative conception, based on that developed by Benedict (1942/1983) and Miles (1988; Miles and Brown, 2003), that can serve as a basis for a social psychology of racism that is sensitive to both its continuity and its changing forms. Although discourse, prejudice, stereotypes, attitudes, emotions, etc. are grounded in semi-autonomous theories and methods, they may be integrated within a broader notion of racialized signification.