Racism, Role Of Power In

Racism is Prejudice plus Power

Four kinds of evidence support this analysis of racism: (1) power guides the construction of racial categories; (2) people—especially the more powerful groups—view socially constructed racial categories as real and essential; (3) people favor their own racial groups; and (4) power plus prejudice makes in-group favoritism asymmetrical in its consequences. This analysis combines the social psychology of categorization, in-group favoritism, and power as control, as well as the sociology and politics of categorical divides in society and its institutions.

Power directs societal categories of race. In the United States, the interests of white slaveholders created the one-drop rule, whereby a person with any evident African ancestry is categorized as black, even if the person's heritage is half or more European. This construction enabled them to own the mixed-race offspring of coerced sexual encounters. Subsequently, it has enabled European Americans to define their racial in-group narrowly, overexcluding multiracial Americans. Increasingly, however, the old definitions are giving way to post racial definitions of more and more Americans as mixed race. And in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas, racial definitions vary by culture. However, in most countries, darker-skinned people are disadvantaged relative to lighter-skinned people.

People reify and essentialize the socially constructed definitions of race, exaggerating their fragile biological basis as representing a fixed categorical divide. In the United States, European Americans who view race in more biological terms also endorse opinions correlated with racial prejudice. For the powerful group, justifying a racially unequal status quo follows from the alleged essence of supposedly distinct racial groups.

Once identified with a particular group, people favor their own in-group, a well-established phenomenon across most human groups. In a zero-sum, fixed-pie context, favoring one's own group means disadvantaging the other group. The evidence for in-group advantage in allocating rewards (e.g., jobs) is stronger than the evidence for overt hostility to the out-group for most people who are not extremist ideologues. Nevertheless, the result of in-group favoritism is discrimination against the out-group.

Discrimination matters only if one controls valued resources. Hence, bias against lower-power groups (by the powerful) carries more impact than [Page 550]bias against powerful groups (by the less powerful). Thus, powerful majority (white) bias toward less powerful minorities (people of color) fits the definition of racism.

How Power Functions in Extreme Racism

Resources controlled by powerful racial groups are both tangible and intangible. More extreme prejudices view less powerful racial groups as threatening the status quo in which the more powerful group controls these resources. One type of prejudice focuses on perceived threat to dominant values. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)—identified by Bob Altemeyer as a more precise, modern version of Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Bruswick, Daniel Levenson, and Nevitt Sanford's 1940s-1950s authoritarian personality—views out-groups as having deviant values. The allegedly threatened values include the work ethic, sexual control, and law and order. Scores on RWA correlate with racial prejudice all over the world.

...