Prejudice theory’s normative rush made structural racial overdetermination unthinkable

Evidence

The social psychology of prejudice was one of the great academic success stories of the second half of the twentieth century and it continues to inform the dominant enlightenment model of how to combat popular racism through public education programs. But in its rush to arrive at a normative solution prejudice theory destroyed the delicate dialectic between the structure of fantasy, the object which it invests with unconscious significance, and the pattern of habitual association encoded in particular kinds of social discourse. Within its truncated conversation between the social and the psychic, the principles of overdetermination at work in racial formations of power and identity became literally unthinkable. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1320

Categorization

• XREF: Overdetermination invokes the Althusserian lens already used in vault entries on racial formation theory. — connects to: Prejudice theory flattened racism into individual attitudes, erasing structural dimensions — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1318
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the Adorno/Lazarsfeld dispute noted for how attitudinal scales operationalize constructs overdetermination cannot capture.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1320