Discriminatory acts rest on shared mental representations even when unintentional

Evidence

The second subsystem of racism is cognitive. Whereas the discriminatory practices of members of dominant groups and institutions form the visible and tangible manifestations of everyday racism, such practices also have a mental basis consisting of biased models of ethnic events and interactions, which in turn are rooted in racist prejudices and ideologies (van Dijk, 1984, 1987,1998). This does not mean that discriminatory practices are always intentional, but only that they presuppose socially shared and negatively oriented mental representations of Us about Them. Most psychological studies of “prejudice” deal with this aspect of racism, though seldom in those terms, that is, in terms of their role in the social system of racism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1054

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• SEED: Angle: mainstream psychology isolates ‘prejudice’ as an individual trait while racism studies treat it as a social-system component — a complaint about disciplinary fragmentation worth developing.

Related

• Racism has a cognitive subsystem of shared mental models beyond visible acts (similarity 0.91)
• Racism operates even without deliberate hatred (similarity 0.82)
• Prejudice theory reduced structural racism to interpersonal attitudes measured by scales (similarity 0.82)
• Unconscious racism names how primordial feeling-structures become racialized (similarity 0.81)
• Prejudice is explained by societal characteristics, not only individual traits (similarity 0.81)
• No single theory can fully explain racism and ethnocentrism. (similarity 0.81)
• Prejudice theory flattened racism into individual attitudes, erasing structural dimensions (similarity 0.81)
• Standard racism measures strip away prejudice’s rhetorical complexity (similarity 0.81)
• Structural racism operates beyond individual intentions and prejudice (similarity 0.81)
• Racism shows natural affinity with anti-modern emotions (similarity 0.81)
• Prejudice is routinely expressed through simultaneous denial in casual talk (similarity 0.80)
• Racism is transmitted through discourse, not innate (similarity 0.80)
• Racial attitudes form several distinct dimensions rather than one unitary prejudice (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice is public harm to esteem, not merely private attitude (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice is deliberately mobilized by elites for strategic gain, not merely implicit cognition (similarity 0.80)