Racial Sensitivity Research Articles

The strategic pursuit of moral credentials

Moral credentials establish one's virtue and license one to act in morally disreputable ways with impunity (Monin & Miller, 2001). We propose that when people anticipate doing something morally dubious, they strategically attempt to earn moral credentials. Participants who expected to do something that could appear racist (decline to hire a Black job candidate in Studies 1 and 2, or take a test that might reveal implicit racial bias in Study 3) subsequently sought to establish non-racist credentials (by expressing greater racial sensitivity in Studies 1 and 2, or by exaggerating how favorably they perceived a Black job candidate in Study 3). Consistent with prior research, a follow-up study revealed that the opportunity to establish such credentials subsequently licensed participants to express more favorable attitudes towards a White versus a Black individual. We argue that strategically pursuing moral credentials allows individuals to manage attributions about their morally dubious behavior.

Motherhood in Black and Brown: Advertising to U.S. Minority Women

Motherhood in Black and Brown:Advertising to U.S. Minority Women Elizabeth C. Hirshman (bio) Introduction The two largest person-of-color ethnic groups in the United States are blacks and Hispanics.1 Reading through the past 40 years worth of research on advertising to African-American and Hispanic consumers is a discouraging exercise.2 What one learns is that although the proportion of blacks (12 percent) and Hispanics (16 percent) represented in national advertising is largely consistent with the proportion of these groups in the U.S. population as a whole, the specific products being advertised and the representational depiction of both African-American and Hispanic consumers is troubling.3 For example, studies conducted during the past decade show that Black and Hispanic consumers are more often targeted through media placement for alcohol and tobacco products, and are more frequently depicted in mainstream advertising as heavy users of alcohol and tobacco products.4 This may stimulate increased usage of such products among these groups, and may also feed racist perceptions that black and Hispanics are heavy users of these products. Neither outcome, of course, is an attractive one. Both blacks and Hispanics are also often depicted as overly sexualized in media representations, perhaps the most problematic of these being music video programs which commonly show blacks and Latinos drinking, smoking, and having sex.5 While this may create feelings of envy among some elements of the non-minority population, it also puts forward objectionable role models for those viewing the programs, who most often are black and Hispanic teenagers.6 Advertising Stereotypes of Black and Brown Women From these population level advertising stereotypes, we now focus more tightly on gender depictions within each group, specifically on the depictions of black and Hispanic women. How are African-American and Hispanic women, the two primary women-of-color communities in the United States, portrayed in advertising? An article by Kern-Foxworth published online by the Center for Media Literacy,7 notes that the Quaker Oats iconic black female image of Aunt Jemima, first used in 1889, remains the most recognized "face" of black womanhood in the United States. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Original Aunt Jemima. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. "Updated" Aunt Jemima. The original Aunt Jemima image is a heavy-set woman who wears a yellow bandana covering her hair. She has African facial features and dark skin. Her intertextual history dates back to the pre-Civil War era of "black mammies" who raised the children of affluent white families in the South, a responsibility that often left the "mammy" little time to care for her own children.8 Even Aunt Jemima's name suggests this role—the term "aunt" is a southern U.S. "honorific" title for blacks who worked in the house as servants; ("Uncle Rastus" was the male iconic equivalent for Cream of Wheat cereal). Further, the given name "Jemima" was a common female slave name.9 The "new and improved" image for Aunt Jemima, introduced by Quaker in 1989, depicts her as slimmer, with uncovered hair, pearl earrings, lighter skin, and a white collar. She now has been made to resemble a contemporary African-American house maid in an affluent white home. This does not suggest a growth in racial sensitivity on the part of the Quaker Oats Corporation. Kern-Foxworth10 notes that advertisers have "shied away from using black models, particularly in advertisements for cosmetics and health and beauty aids. This, despite the fact that African-American women spend up to five times more on personal care products than the average [white] customer…. By 1993, black women are expected to buy more than 50 percent of the health and beauty aids used in the U.S." At the time of her writing and into the present day, African-American women compose about 12 percent of the U.S. female population, thus they are greatly disproportionate purchasers of cosmetics and health and beauty products.11 Kern-Foxworth12 further notes that "growing recognition and lessening of [black female] stereotypes are welcome… [however] we must remember that we are wanted not for ourselves, but for our growing...

After Hiroshima: the United States, race and nuclear weapons in Asia, 1945-1965

By emphasising the role of nuclear issues, After Hiroshima, published in 2010, provides an original history of American policy in Asia between the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, Matthew Jones charts the development of American nuclear strategy and the foreign policy problems it raised, as the United States both confronted China and attempted to win the friendship of an Asia emerging from colonial domination. In underlining American perceptions that Asian peoples saw the possible repeat use of nuclear weapons as a manifestation of Western attitudes of 'white superiority', he offers new insights into the links between racial sensitivities and the conduct of US policy, and a fresh interpretation of the transition in American strategy from massive retaliation to flexible response in the era spanned by the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Shylock and Othello under the Nazis

ABSTRACTWhile the long‐standing historical importance of Shakespeare's plays in the repertoire of German theatres is well‐documented, including even under the ‘Third Reich’, there are misconceptions in some of the literature about the stage history of two plays that one would expect to touch on Nazi racial sensitivities in very different ways: The Merchant of Venice and Othello. It would be natural to expect, as some authors have written, that The Merchant of Venice would lend itself to Nazi antisemitism and that the play would enjoy a particular currency on German stages after 1933, while one would expect Othello, with its theme of inter‐racial sex, to disappear from the stage under the Nazi régime. These assumptions were not borne out by the reality, however, and the stage histories of the two plays under the Nazi régime were more complex. The way in which the Jew Shylock and the Moor Othello were portrayed on the German stage after 1933 was nonetheless tightly constrained by the prescriptions of Nazi racial ideology.Dass die Werke Shakespeares einen bedeutenden Platz in der Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, auch in der Zeit des ‘Dritten Reichs’, eingenommen haben, darf als allgemein bekannt gelten. Jedoch sind in der theatergeschichtlichen Literatur immer noch irrige Annahmen anzutreffen, was die Bühnengeschichte zweier Shakespeareschen Stücke angeht, die auf verschiedene Weise von besonderer Relevanz für die Rassenideologie des Nationalsozialismus waren: Der Kaufmann von Venedig und Othello. Es läge nahe anzunehmen, wie manche Autoren auch vermutet haben, dass Der Kaufmann von Venedig dem Antisemitismus des NS‐Regimes besonders entgegenkommen würde, wogegen Othello, mit der Thematik der sexuellen Beziehung zwischen den ‘Rassen’ während der NS‐Zeit von der Bühne verschwinden würde. Die eigentliche Bühnengeschichte der jeweiligen Stücke im ‘Dritten Reich’ verlief aber anders, und war in der Wirklichkeit komplizierter als man oft angenommen hat. Nichtsdestoweniger waren Darstellungen des Juden Shylock und des Mohren Othello auf der deutschen Bühne nach 1933 von der NS‐Ideologie zunehmend stark geprägt und mussten innerhalb der durch sie eng gezogenen Grenzen bleiben.

The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 68 The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s. By Amy L. Koehlinger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. x, 304 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-674-02473-1. In the 1950s Catholic nuns were educating nearly ten percent of U.S. children. There were more nuns in the United States than in any other country in the world. “Sisters,” as they were addressed, formed the vast majority of teachers and administrators in thousands of Catholic schools and a significant proportion of nurses in Catholic hospitals. In a nation known mainly for its affluence, tens of thousands of young women had relinquished personal possessions and family ties in order to dedicate themselves to prayer, convent routines, and service in schools and hospitals . By 1965, the peak year of membership, more than 180,000 sisters were living in scores of orders, each with its own distinctive medieval dress or “habit.” In that same year, however, the rules and routines of sisters’ lives were suddenly thrown into flux. In the wake of Vatican II, a major reform council in Rome that aimed to update and liberalize the Church’s teachings and institutions, sisters began to modify the traditional habit, move out of convents into smaller communities, and initiate new works with the mainly non-Catholic poor. Given their impact on education and healthcare in the United States, it is remarkable that so little has been written about American nuns in the twentieth century. Amy Koehlinger’s The New Nuns, a beautifully written account of the experiences of the sisters who initiated programs for interracial justice in the 1960s, begins to fill this void. Koehlinger recounts how, in March 1965, fifty-six sisters transcended the traditional strictures of cloister to join the thousands of civil rights activists who marched from Selma to Montgomery. Although many more lay Catholics than nuns participated in the freedom marches, the media focused upon Catholic sisters marching in their robes and veils. As the Selma sisters’ photos flashed across the country, those images inspired other sisters to re-think their ministries. Some sisters began to lobby their superiors for permission to leave the parochial schools to engage in work that they said was more relevant to the social needs of the times. They argued that working for justice for society’s most oppressed would be in closer keeping with the original purposes of their orders as well as the ecumenicism and social justice promoted by the Vatican council. Koehlinger narrates how one of the Selma marchers, Sister Margaret Traxler, coordinated a mini-explosion of programs aimed at gaining justice for blacks and reducing prejudice among whites. Traxler was a master at securing funds J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 69 from Catholic sources and the federal government (President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity) in order to run new sisterstaffed programs for racial justice. Hundreds of sisters volunteered as summer instructors at southern black colleges so that African American faculty members could devote their summers to research and publishing . Others ran racial sensitivity training workshops in Catholic parishes around the country. In Project Cabrini, sisters ran a free summer school near a Chicago housing project that offered art, music, reading, math, and African American history to nine hundred children a day in 1965. By 1967, nuns were running similar programs in eleven U.S. cities. Koehlinger gives us an astute account of the confluence of religious, educational, and political forces that helped to make the new nuns possible . She reports that the sisters involved in interracial ministry in the 1960s subsequently wielded disproportionate influence over the shape of reforms in sisters’ communities in the 1970s. She also mines a treasure trove of sisters’ letters, supplemented by interviews, to offer a perceptive reading of nuns’ inner experiences. In her chapter on the “Selma Sisters,” Koehlinger compares the attitudes of white sisters who ran a hospital for African Americans in Selma with the attitudes of northern sisters who came to march in Alabama in 1965, revealing varied approaches of...

An Empirical Study of College of Education Faculty’s Perceptions, Beliefs, and Commitment to the Teaching of Diversity in Teacher Education Programs at Four Urban Universities

This study used empirical data to investigate College of Education faculty’s perceptions, beliefs, and commitment to diversity. A 44-item survey composed of Likert scale-type questions about characteristics, experiences, perspectives, and personal commitments to addressing diversity issues together with demographic questions, was administered to 116 COE faculty from four urban universities. A MANOVA where the independent variables were the demographic data and the dependent variables were five subscales (importance of diversity, training for pre-service teachers, college support, teaching diversity in courses, and issues of racial sensitivity) identified four statistically significant factors in faculty’s beliefs regarding the importance of diversity. The study found no support for a relationship between the faculty’s beliefs about the importance of teaching diversity and their teaching practices.

Anti-Client and Pro-Client Positions in Interracial Psychotherapy

The article reports on the findings of a study designed to explore the thoughts, feelings and fantasies of white South African therapists working interracially. The research was couched within an expanded understanding of Pedersen's Model for training in multicultural psychotherapy. More specifically, it investigates how therapists' therapy-hindering (‘anti-client’) statements reflect aspects of racial prejudice in South Africa and South African psychology, how their therapy-facilitating (‘pro-client’) statements reflect racial sensitivity, and how these competing attitudes are negotiated when therapists reflect on them. The contribution of the study is the explication of both positive and negative therapist self-talk in interracial contexts. Implications of the findings are discussed and the development of an Anti-client-Pro-client Model for counsellor sensitivity training is recommended as an extension of the framework promulgated by Pedersen (1985, 2000).

Product Review: Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution

Product Review: Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution

Race experts: How racial etiquette, sensitivity training and new age therapy hijacked the civil righs revolution

Race experts: How racial etiquette, sensitivity training and new age therapy hijacked the civil righs revolution

Textual Spaces, Social Identities and Race in Singapore Advertising

Advertising in Singapore contests certain notions that prevail in much of the current advertising theory - notions of the advertisement as `commodity sign', removed from the real particularities of social contexts, in order to interpellate consumer readers into a uniform set of `symbolic exchange values'. The influence of Marxist thought in such theory is clear. However, this method of analysis is not remunerative in the Singapore context, chiefly because of its small size, highly multiracial and multicultural society and strong degree of governance. These are manifested in a number of ways: indirectly, for example, in the creation of so-called `Asian values' which are meant to resist `western influence'; and directly in the form of media and advertising regulations and government advertising campaigns that create signs quite different from the commodity signs touted by neo-Marxist theory. In addition, racial and cultural sensitivities are registered in textual dialogics which interrogate both this theory as well as the constructed identities (whether commodified or governanced) in advertising texts.

Making space for racial dialogue: our experience in a marriage and family therapy training program.

Marriage and family therapy (MFT) training programs need to create opportunities for all students to develop cultural competency by raising their racial awareness and sensitivity. Likewise, therapists of color need to be offered space in MFT programs to voice their experiences and venues for their voices to be heard. This article reports on the efforts within a master's level, accredited MFT training program to create space, through participatory action research, for the unique experiences of therapists of color and White therapists who are deeply committed to racial sensitivity.

Race experts: How racial etiquette, sensitivity training, and New Age therapy hijacked the civil rights revolution

Race experts: How racial etiquette, sensitivity training, and New Age therapy hijacked the civil rights revolution

Impacting Student Perceptions of and Attitudes Toward Race in the Interracial Communication Course

My project explored whether or not my approach to teaching an interracial communication course was effective in reducing racial prejudice and promoting racial sensitivity and awareness among undergraduate students. Analysis of student narratives and focus groups reveals that my approach was effective in impacting student perceptions of, and attitudes towards, race. Cognition, affect, and behavior were found to influence a student's ability to understand and transfer classroom knowledge to real-world human interactions. Most students adopted ways of thinking and behaviors that combat racism on an interpersonal level. My own teaching was enhanced by hearing and watching these changes take place.

Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution

Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution

Effective palliative care for minority ethnic groups: the role of a liaison worker.

As the issue of equality of access to health-care services becomes more important, there is increasing concern that specialist palliative care services in the UK are under-used by minority ethnic groups (Haroon-Iqbal et al, 1995; Karim et al, 2000). Research into the provision of such services for black and minority ethnic communities identified a number of factors that contribute to a perceived low take-up of services (Hill and Penso, 1995). A strategy to promote ethnic and racial sensitivity in palliative care service delivery, and policies to improve access to, and take-up of, services was recommended. This article presents the important elements relating to equal access to specialist palliative care and the provision of culturally sensitive services, and examines the role of the Macmillan Ethnic Minorities Liaison Officer in the Bradford community palliative care team.

Increasing Ethical Sensitivity to Racial and Gender Intolerance in Schools: Development of the Racial Ethical Sensitivity Test

This article is an attempt to develop a measure of ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance that occurs in schools. Acts of intolerance that indicate ethically insensitive behaviors in American schools were identified and tied to existing professional ethical codes developed by school-based professional organizations. The Racial Ethical Sensitivity Test (REST) consists of 5 scenarios that portray acts of racial intolerance and ethical insensitivity. Participants viewed 2 videotaped scenarios and then responded to a semistructured interview protocol adapted from Bebeau and Rest (1982). After a 2-week interval, this procedure was repeated. Stability of the REST across time was determined by using the overall test-retest coefficient. Internal as well as interrater consistency was also calculated for each scenario. Overall findings indicate promise for the REST as a reliable measure to assess racial and ethnic sensitivity.

Uncommon strategies for a common problem: addressing racism in family therapy.

Race and racism have a profound effect on our daily lives and the practice of family therapy. Whether individual or institutional level, overt or covert, intentional or unintentional, there are a variety of ways in which racism can infiltrate the therapeutic process. Before therapists can take steps to address racism effectively within the context of family therapy, it is important to attend to the development of their racial awareness and racial sensitivity. These provide the critical foundation upon which specific skills and strategies associated with effectively identifying and responding to racism in therapy are based. This article defines racial awareness and sensitivity and provides suggestions for enhancing both. In the section that follows, three major ways in which racism can infiltrate the therapeutic process are described. Skills and strategies for addressing each of these in family therapy are presented.

Issues and trends in contemporary African politics: stability, development, and democratization

Africa, at the close of the twentieth century, has witnessed a tremendous amount of social, economic, and political transformation. By tackling the issues of political instability, democratization, and economic development, this book goes to the heart of the African conundrum and makes an invaluable contribution to Africa's development. Written by Africans, it offers a much needed « African perspective that is often lacking in most development literature. African authors are not so encumbered by « political correctness or « racial sensitivity and can write more candidly on events as they see them. The book constitutes a long-awaited break with orthodoxy and makes a pioneering effort to tackle issues traditionally spurned by experts because of their rigid separation of economic development and politics. The writers offer constructive solutions to Africa's problems--solutions which only Africans would dare to suggest.

Transracial placement outcomes and assessment of racial sensitivity in white carers

This paper outlines some of the historical issues regarding transracial placement and relates these to the British cultural context. Issues of identity, and the particular placement needs of children of mixed parentage background, where one parent is white and one is black, are considered. Case study material is used to illustrate the issues involved in assessing white substitute carers and how, on the basis of Helm’s (1992) work, the assessment of potential substitute carers may be made more objective. Finally, implications for the work of educational psychologists are suggested.

Diagnosing Deficits in “Basic Trust” in Multiracial and Multicultural Groups: Individual or Social Psychopathology?

Deficiencies in “basic trust” frequently undermine the efficacy of group therapy in multiracial and multicultural groups. It is necessary to distinguish trust deficits caused by individual psychopathology, societal attitudes (“cultural pathology”), or a combination of both. A typology for classifying self-disclosure problems in multicultural and multiracial groups is presented, and illustrated with case material: Mode A, “Good enough trust,” allows patient self-disclosure in multicultural groups; Mode B, Low level of cultural paranoia and high level of functional paranoia; Mode C, Culturally paranoid individual can self-disclose in culturally homogeneous group but mistrusts outsiders; Mode D, Confluent paranoid has high levels of both functional and cultural paranoia. For Modes C and D, it is crucial that experiences of bias be acknowledged and empathized with first before patients will be able to achieve good enough trust to risk self-disclosure. The ethnic composition of the group must be attended to in the placement of these patients. Hospital (inpatient) groups are especially likely to have problems with “basic trust.” The role of the leader in demonstrating empathy, tolerance, racial sensitivity, and appropriate self-disclosure is emphasized. Cultural awareness training, a personal group therapy experience for the therapist, and the use of co-therapists are recommended as ways of minimizing negative countertransference or cultural bias on the part of the leader.