Racist Thinking and Thinking about Race: What Children Know but Don't Say

Abstract

|H | ow is it that racialist thinking is so easily transformed into racist thinking? Why do people so quickly move from recognizing racial categories to using them as a basis for the distribution of resources, power, and authority? What accounts for the predisposition to make inferences about unobservable qualities, such as intelligence, employability, threat, and honesty, based on observations of racial group membership. Whether or not people do so is indisputable. Evidence from the social science literature, the media, and casual observation suggests that prejudice and discrimination based on racial group membership is pervasive, especially in the United States. Why they do so, and under what circumstances, is less well understood. These sorts of questions serve as the focal point of Lawrence Hirschfeld's paper The Conceptual Politics of Race. In an attempt to address them, Hirschfeld takes as his point of departure two perspectives on the complex relationship between race as a category of power and race as a category of mind. Psychologists, Hirschfeld contends, view race as a category of power because it is a category of mind. That is, the race concept, and associated phenomenon such as prejudice, in-group favoritism/out-group enmity, and other cognitive biases are viewed as mere