Lay explanations of racism favor individual pathology over structural factors

Evidence

Popular (lay) analyses of racism tend to explain it with reference to individual pathology or psychological or moral ‘defect’. As Pettigrew ( 1996 ) argues, popular analyses of racism tend to approach societal issues (like the pervasiveness and complexity of prejudice) as if they were ‘simply a problem of disturbed individuals’ (p. 109). Popular analysis also recognizes that words can hurt or wound, in the same way as some researchers do (Graumann, 1998 ). Popular analysis of racism embraces wholeheartedly a lay version of individual differences between people and more readily embraces explanations based on individual pathology than those based on socio-structural factors. — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s work on moral panics and how society prefers to locate disorder in defective individuals rather than social structure. — connects to: Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 82; Everyday racism links small recurring injustices to macrostructural racial hierarchies — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1455; Racism functions structurally apart from individuals’ personal intent — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1477 (+1 more)

Related

• Structural racism operates beyond individual intentions and prejudice (similarity 0.80)
• Psychoanalytic accounts of racism reduce structural inequality to individual unconscious dynamics (similarity 0.78)
• Subtle bias alone cannot explain racism’s societal persistence (similarity 0.78)
• Racism theories divide into ideology-focused and structural-inequality approaches (similarity 0.78)