Negative Stereotypes Of Blacks Research Articles

Rewriting American History in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Metahistoricity, the Postcolonial Subject, and the Return of the Repressed

Writing as an African American woman existing at the margins of American society in the mid 1970s, Mildred D. Taylor demonstrated a postmodern awareness of fictionality and history in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976). Reworking African American history from the point of view and voice of a black subaltern female child, Taylor succeeds in recovering a silenced and repressed history of African Americans, and in adding that history to the larger American experience. Instead of reinforcing and perpetuating negative stereotypes of blacks—individual or collective—that are historically produced by and distributed in a white society, and taking their passive, marginalized, and violated status for granted, Taylor represents African Americans as active agents, who can employ strategic resistance—”trickery” and “disidentification”—in order to reappropriate dominant, repressive discourses for their own purposes to survive in a racist society. In doing so, Taylor does not make her historical fiction merely serve as a record of conventional history. Instead, she creates a meaningful place in which the once ostracized, discriminated against, and marginalized voice not only can be heard, recognized, and respected, but also the formerly voiceless Others can be transformed into historical subjects or agents able to challenge master narratives and hierarchies.

Why Do You Talk, You Know, like “That”?: Using scm and evt to Explore the Microaggressive Student-Teacher Bullying of Expectancy-Violating Black Women

The purpose of this article is to examine a personal narrative situated within the contexts of two theoretical frameworks, Stereotype Content Model (Glick & Fiske, 1996; Fiske, 2012) and Expectancy Violation Theory (Bettencourt, Dill, Greathouse, Charlton, & Mulholland, 1997). These frameworks are used to explore a form of microaggressive student-teacher bullying that aims to force black women to act more consistently with negative stereotypes of blacks and women. Rather than a definitive study, this work aims to widen the ongoing equity conversations by heightening awareness of this form of bullying, and of ways to cope as its target.

Veiled Discrimination: Coercive Assimilationism in the Workplace

Fifty years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, unlawful discrimination continues to ail American workplaces. Despite the prevailing narrative that America is now post-racial after the election of the first African American president, equal opportunity still eludes many Americans. Their membership in racial, ethnic, or religious groups stigmatized as the adversely affects their access to education, political empowerment, and equal opportunity in the workplace.At the time Title VII was passed, victims often experienced explicit bias against their protected group. The law’s immediate effect was to ban overt prejudice causing disparate intergroup discrimination between men and women, blacks and whites, different ethnicities, and Christians and non-Christians.As a result, Title VII, along with other anti-discrimination laws, has been relatively successful in rooting out explicit bias in employment. Many employers now refrain from overtly treating employees disparately on account of an immutable characteristic. But, as the data show, the absence of discriminatory policies on paper does not always translate into a discrimination free workplace in practice. Rather, it pushes bias into more covert manifestations wherein facially neutral factors become proxies for unlawful discrimination.While Title VII prohibits covert bias; it is ill equipped to prevent two increasingly prevalent forms of discrimination: 1) implicit bias arising from negative stereotypes of protected classes; and 2) disparate treatment of subgroups of protected classes who do not conform to coercive assimilationist pressures.Because an employee alleging discrimination must show that a similarly situated worker outside the protected class does not receive the same adverse treatment or impact, an employer who treats a subgroup of a minority better than another subgroup of the same minority can evade liability. Of course, if the difference in treatment among the subgroups is based on performance and skills directly related to the work at issue, then no liability should attach. However, that is not always the case. Disparate treatment of members of the same protected class arises from negative racial, ethnic, or religious stereotypes that privileges those able and willing to perform their identity in accordance with assimilationist demands of the majority group. The effect is intragroup discrimination based on intergroup bias rooted in implicit negative stereotyping. Female employees who fall under multiple protected classes face an intersection of identity performance pressures as women, racial or ethnic minorities, and religious minorities.The dominant group’s expectations of how women or members of minority groups should behave, dress, and communicate to be professional are often contradictory due to conflicting stereotypes. A Black woman, for example, who is assertive, ambitious, and exhibits leadership qualities associated as masculine characteristics, risks being stigmatized as aggressive, insubordinate, and threatening because of negative stereotypes of blacks. Meanwhile, her behavior contradicts gender conformity norms that women should be deferential, gentle, soft spoken, and pleasant. And if she is a Muslim, then her behavior triggers stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists, disloyal, foreign, and suspect.For workplace anti-discrimination laws to eradicate these multiple binds that disparately impact women of color, this Article argues that Title VII jurisprudence should take into account intergroup discrimination based on intragroup identity performance to assure all employees, not just a subset of a protected class, are covered by workplace antidiscrimination law. As such, a plaintiff’s treatment should not be compared only with similarly situated employees outside the protected class but also with similarly situated employees within the protected class whose identity performance accommodates coercive assimilationism rooted in stereotypes.This Article applies social psychology and antidiscrimination theories to the case of Muslim women of color in the workplace, an under-researched area in legal scholarship. I examine in detail the identity performance challenges and contradictions faced by Muslim women of color as intersectionals facing stereotypes against 1) Muslims as terrorists, violent, and disloyal; 2) Muslim women as meek, oppressed, and lacking individual agency; 3) women as sexualized, terminally second best to men, and uncommitted to their careers; 4) immigrants as forever foreign and undeserving of equal treatment; and 5) ethnic minorities from the Middle East and South Asia as barbaric, misogynist, and anti-American. I conclude that Muslim women of color are at risk of falling between the cracks of Title VII jurisprudence due to courts’ unwillingness to recognize the harms caused by coercive assimilationst pressures to conform one’s identity to comport to high status group norms, irrespective of the relevance to work performance.

The “Obama Effect” and White Racial Attitudes

To what extent did the presidential candidacy and election of Barack Obama affect whites’ more general perceptions of African Americans? Responses to survey questions in which respondents were asked to place blacks on scales running from “stupid” to “intelligent” and from “lazy” to “hardworking” revealed that whites’ views of blacks’ intelligence and work ethic have become somewhat more positive, though whites continued to be rated higher on these attributes than were blacks. The fact that negative stereotypes of blacks were least pronounced among younger whites implies that these stereotypes will continue to fade in the future. These data do not constitute proof positive of an “Obama effect” on whites’ racial attitudes, but they are largely consistent with that idea.

Blame It on Hip-Hop: Anti-Rap Attitudes as a Proxy for Prejudice

This research investigated the stereotypes associated with rap music and hip-hop culture, and how those stereotypes may influence anti-Black attitudes and justifications for discrimination. In three studies—using a representative sample from America, as well as samples from two different countries—we found that negative stereotypes about rap are pervasive and have powerful consequences. In all three samples, negative attitudes toward rap were associated with various measures of negative stereotypes of Blacks that blamed Blacks for their economic plights (via stereotypes of laziness). Anti-rap attitudes were also associated with discrimination against Blacks, through both personal and political behaviors. In both American samples, the link between anti-rap attitudes and discrimination was partially or fully mediated by stereotypes that convey Blacks' responsibility. This legitimizing pattern was not found in the UK sample, suggesting that anti-rap attitudes are used to reinforce beliefs that Blacks do not deserve social benefits in American society, but may not be used as legitimizing beliefs in other cultures.

Perceived Academic Competence and Overall Job Evaluations: Students' Evaluations of African American and European American Professors

Despite the fact that few people appear to endorse negative stereotypes of Blacks, such stereotypes are widely disseminated in our culture. Consequently, such stereotypes can have pervasive consequences on one's impressions of African Americans, even by low‐prejudice Whites and by Blacks themselves. Thus, we predicted that student judgments of intellectual competence would be more important when students were making global performance evaluations of Black faculty than of White faculty. Furthermore, to the extent that intellectual competence is more salient in the judgment of Black faculty, such judgments should be essentially the same among Black and White students, and for low‐ and high‐prejudice students. For the most part, analyses of instructor evaluations at a major American university supported these expectations.

Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945 Gregory Michael Dorr Pippa Holloway . Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xi + 258 pp. $59.95 (cloth, ISBN 10: 0-8078-3051-8; ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3051-2); $19.95 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-8078-5764-5; ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5764-9). In Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945, Holloway takes issue with previous scholarship and expands our understanding of state-building in Virginia. She depicts the Old Dominion's political elite constructing a stable, distinctively southern social order by relying on the complex interplay of race, class, and gender—all bound by issues of sexuality. Holloway strings together disparate topics—eugenic sterilization and marriage restriction, movie censorship, venereal-disease [End Page 220] control, efforts to regulate barbers, premarital venereal-disease testing, and birth control—to demonstrate that "sexual regulation was both a flexible tool that could be deployed in diverse ways in changing times and a productive technique that created classes of rulers and subjects" (p. 6). Properly deployed, sexual regulations buttressed the status quo. While perfect "social control" was never achieved, these regulations exerted profound power. Holloway's first chapters recount the passage and enforcement of Virginia's eugenic sterilization and antimiscegenation laws, and the creation of the state's board of motion picture censors. That elite Virginians—including the state's medical profession—created social policy by coupling eugenics with more traditional race, class, and gender concerns is not news. Nor is it surprising that the enforcement of eugenics laws identified and further stigmatized already-marginal populations (women, the poor, African Americans). Holloway is not (as she implies) the first to recognize that lawmakers enacted these measures as much to tighten the state's purse strings as to protect Virginia's gene pool, but her analysis of overlooked evidence demonstrates how quasi-medical, eugenic definitions of "normal" and "abnormal" sexual behavior reinforced the prerogatives of Virginia's ruling elite. Her treatment of the Virginia State Board of Censors looks beyond race to sexuality as the underlying issue provoking the censors' ire: by controlling what forms of sexuality Virginians could see on-screen, the censors slowed changes in sexual mores and conserved elites' power. Holloway next examines venereal disease (VD) control and birth control. Fears about aberrant sexuality combined with race, gender, and class prejudices to convince "white, elite male policy makers that many of those suffering with venereal disease were dangerous and irresponsible" (p. 78), and that birth control "spoke as much to concern for the needs of the poor as to a eugenic agenda" (p. 140). In this atmosphere, elite white Virginians sought to manage federal VD control efforts during the world wars. Officials used rhetoric about sexuality to reconcile federal imperatives and the local political economy—all in the name of national defense. Simultaneously, African Americans turned federal VD control efforts to their own ends, attracting federal and philanthropic money and attention. Similarly, proliferating birth control clinics helped women attain increased sexual autonomy, easing the child-rearing burden on poor women of both races. The result was improved socioeconomic status. These incursions into elite, white male power presaged the emergence of more effective challenges to negative stereotypes of blacks and women during the later civil rights and women's liberation movements. The book ends with case studies of Richmond and Norfolk during World War II. In Richmond, the successful invocation of sexual rhetoric inspired public policies that fostered an "orderly city" characterized by venereal-disease control, racial quiescence, and political harmony. In Norfolk, however, the ham-handed manipulation of sexually charged issues failed to bolster elite power, securing the city's ignominy as a southern Sodom. In apposition, these chapters throw sexuality's influence on state-building into stark relief. [End Page 221] Holloway's observation that elite Virginians manipulated notions of sexuality alongside traditional stereotypes to control marginalized populations is not stunning. Yet a short review cannot do justice to the nuance of her argument, its effective depiction of sexuality's many "contested terrains" and of how elite Virginians' reliance on regulating sexuality ironically planted...

In Reply

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article LettersFull AccessIn ReplyCarl Bell, M.D.Carl BellSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Jun 2005https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.56.6.753-aAboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In Reply: It was once explained to me: a recipe is simple, building a moon rocket is complicated, and raising a child is complex. Dr. Leon's letter raises the complexity of considering some forms of racism a mental illness. His query about how to address individual psychopathology—such as the false belief of racial superiority that some would classify as a delusion—when social convention partly supports racism, explains why this topic of racism is so multifarious. I contend that we should let science help us understand that racial and ethnic diversity does not dictate superiority or inferiority of one group over another. An ecotone is a zone between two ecological zones where two distinct clusters of biological organisms overlap. Scientists have shown this diverse area to be the place of most innovation, learning, creativity, and adaptation in biology. I maintain that our culture should take a lesson from biology to correct the acceptance of racism in our midst.Dr. Leon's letter also raises the issue that racism is not the only form of a destructive fixed belief. We agree, and members of our racism work group are considering the issue of pathological bias (1). In addition, research suggests that openness to experience, which is one of the "big five" personality traits (extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience), may mitigate against negative stereotypes of blacks by whites (2). This is an interesting finding given that this personality trait is estimated to have a heritability of 40 percent (3).I completely agree with Dr. Leon's point about the need for psychiatry to be on guard for false beliefs even if most of the culture believes them. In my opinion such beliefs are a mixture of psychiatric, public health, moral, and ethical problems with which psychiatrists should grapple and provide some leadership, by—as Dr. Leon suggests—conducting research on the causes of mental illness. Being African American I can attest to the fact that racism is very much a source of stress, and Dr. Chester Pierce (4) has solid research findings that document this reality.Finally, Dr. Leon's letter represents what I have always respected about psychiatrists, their willingness to have a mind that is open to new ideas. I appreciate his fair words and his reminder that new and helpful ideas are not always popular.

Analysis of Black Images in Comic Strips, 1915–1995

Negative stereotypes of blacks were dominant in strips before 1955, but virtually nonexistent in 1995. Black characters in current strips are portrayed in a wider variety of occupational roles and social settings than in the past.

Racial Stereotypes and Whites' Political Views of Blacks in the Context of Welfare and Crime

Theory: Social psychological theories of social stereotyping are used to generate a series of predictions about how and when whites'stereotypes of African-Americans are likely to bias their evaluations of blacks in the areas of welfare and crime. Hypotheses: The degree to which whites endorse negative stereotypes of blacks not only tends to bias their judgments of black (versus white) welfare recipients and criminal suspects, but also affects the way they respond to counter-stereotypical information about the target. Methods: Regression analysis and analysis of variance of data from a series of survey experiments with 1,841 whites in which the race and other attributes of welfare mothers, welfare recipients, and drug suspects were manipulated. Results: Whites holding negative stereotypes are substantially more likely to judge blacks more harshly than similarly described whites in the areas of welfare and crime policy. We also find that even whites with strongly negative perceptions of blacks respond quite favorably to them when confronted with individuating information that clearly contradicts their stereotype. By way of contrast, respondents who reject negative stereotypes of African-Americans display a remarkable consistency in their responses across both the race and the individuating information of the target.

Black Stereotyping in a University Population

Abstract Replications of the Katz and Braly (1933) study of racial stereotypes from 1951, 1967, 1971, 1982, and 1993 reveal significant changes in how white university students stereotype blacks. The 1993 replication was conducted at a large, mid-western university. Review of the top five black stereotypes from 1932 through 1993 suggests a trend towards stereotypes that are more threatening to whites. Supplementing this overview are results from a more extensive 1992 survey examining racial attitudes among 918 undergraduates at the same large, mid-western university. White students are most likely to adhere to negative stereotypes of blacks while black students are most likely to adhere to positive stereotypes of blacks. Controlling other relevant factors, members of Greek organizations (fraternities and sororities) register significantly higher stereotyping scores than non-members. In addition, multivariate analysis indicates a strong, inverse relationship between school year and stereotype adherence, as...

Categorization and Stereotyping: Effects of Group Context on Memory and Social Judgment

Three studies examined several hypotheses concerning the effects of group context on categorization and the subsequent effects of categorization on memory and social judgment. Using a paradigm developed by Taylor and her colleagues (Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978), subjects in Studies 1 and 2 were exposed to a slide and audiotape depiction of a 6-person group discussing affirmative action. The racial makeup of the group was manipulated such that subjects either saw a balanced race group (three Black and three White members) or a solo Black/five White person group. In each case, three of the discussants expressed pro-and three expressed anti-affirmative action attitudes. We hypothesized that (1) race and attitude position would serve as encoding cues, resulting in greater frequency of within-than between-category errors in cued recall, and (2) White subjects′ negative stereotypes of Blacks would be activated by the racial overtones of the discussion, but would be offset by concerns about appearing non-prejudiced. This would result in more positive evaluations of Black than White targets, particularly among subjects scoring low in racism. This effect was expected to be reversed when race was no longer a salient aspect of the situation (Study 3). As a third hypothesis we set forth conflicting predictions about the effects of the group context manipulation on social judgment: Taylor et al.′s (1978) perceptual salience hypothesis and Oakes and Turner′s (1986; Oakes, 1987) functional perspective on category salience. Hypotheses 1 and 2 received sound support, and the data were more consistent with the Taylor than with the Oakes predictions. Findings are discussed in regard to modern racism, construct accessibility, perceptual salience, and contextual changes in category use.

Racism and Private Assistance: The Support of West Indian and African Missions in Liverpool, England, during the Interwar Years

whites as blacks lived within Toxteth, an area in the city's south end near the docks. Blacks and whites mixed freely in the area's numerous pubs, and black men often married white women. Despite the city's historical relationship with the slave trade and slavery, many of those who lived in Liverpool during the 1920s and 1930s accepted the pervasive myth of racial harmony in the city. However, some blacks who were more observant recognized that they were being denied adequate economic and social opportunities. Indeed, the city was not free of racial prejudice. In reality, the legacy of the slave trade and slavery and the negative stereotypes of blacks which had been developed over many years were so ingrained in the minds, hearts, attitudes and actions of many Liverpudlians that, wittingly and unwittingly, racism adversely affected the quality of life for black people in the city.2 To reiterate, there was no color bar in Liverpool and when blacks fell on hard times local agencies appeared to provide some degree of relief. Regrettably, many of these agencies possessed and expounded a racist, paternalistic ideology which viewed blacks as a problem. Blacks were seen as a people of naturally inferior ability and morals who needed special aid in order to survive in a foreign, white, and competitive society. These agencies believed their approach to providing desperately needed services for indigent blacks was beneficial. However, this was not the case because these agencies favored