Showing papers on "Prejudice published in 1984"

Prejudice in discourse

Abstract: In this book, a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation, based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members. After an introductory survey of traditional and more recent approaches in social psychology to the study of prejudice, a new 'sociocognitive' theory is sketched. This theory explains how cognitive representations and strategies of ethnic prejudice depend on their social functions within intergroup relations. It is also shown how ethnic prejudice is communicated in society through everyday talk among majority members. The major part of the book systematically analyzes the various dimensions of prejudiced conversations, such as topical structures, storytelling, argumentation, local semantic strategies, style and rhetoric, and more specific conversational properties. It is shown that such an explicit discourse analysis may reveal underlying cognitive representations and strategic uses of prejudice. Moreover, it appeared that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and should be of interest to linguists, discourse analysts, cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and all those interested in ethnic stereotypes, prejudice, and racism.

Racism as a Cause of Depression

Abstract: Racism is not just an added stress to individuals of minority ethnic groups (identified as racial groups) but is a pathogen which generates depression. In analysing this within a social model of depression indicating a few ways in which racism subtly - and not so subtly - affects self esteem, causes losses in a psychological sense, and promotes a sense of helplessness (Table 2) I have indicated ways in which this perspective should influence treatment. A more complex scheme summarising the matters raised in this paper are given in Table 3. It should be acknowledged that in depression (as in any other psychiatric illness), the patient is implicated in the genesis of the condition one way or another, but the emphasis given in this paper to a "victim" approach is deliberate and necessary. In dealing with depression among people who are victims of social condition be it racism or the unemployment it is all too easy to see the individual as the problem. We then see solutions merely in terms of changing or treating the individual and really get into quite a mess. For example the author was recently talking to a G.P. about a man who had become depressed because of unemployment. The G.P. wanted to give him an antidepressant. Yes X is "good for unemployment" he was told. He did not see the joke. The emphasis had already shifted. Even if we recognise the effects of racism in causing identity crises, low self esteem or a sense of helplessness, we must of course help the individual but we must keep reminding ourselves that the problem is not really the low self esteem or whatever, but the racism.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

The Bisexual Identity: An Idea Without Social Recognition

Abstract: Theories of sexuality reflect popular notions by treating sexual identity as a simple dichotomy. There is research evidence for the coexistence of homosexual and heterosexual interest and behavior in a significant portion of the population. This paper examines how various conceptualizations of human sexuality have failed to adequately deal with bisexuality. The lack of acknowledgement by both the larger heterosexual society and the emerging lesbian/gay community, and its impact on the individual bisexual is examined by using the sociological concept of marginality. Some of the differences in self-labeling by women and men are noted in the light of social sex-roles. Finally, the implications of society's acceptance of bisexuality for evolving forms of relationships are suggested.

Hystery, Herstory, History: "Imagining the Real" in Thomas's "The White Hotel"

Abstract: The proper relation of art's forms to social facts has been a pressing problem for artists in this century, and so also has been the relation of psychoanalysis to political explanations of human behavior. For all their acute sensitivity to the society around them, the great modernist artists tended to give us survival by aesthetic escape into a contemplative and esoteric realm of imaginative creation. Yeats, for example, who is invoked in the epigraph of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, often worried about his poetry's responsibility for actual destruction, but he always reaffirmed, though with increasing self-irony, that the purged fantasies of art were his most adequate response to the brutal fantasies ruining the social and political life of Ireland. Likewise Freud personally experienced discrimination as a Jew both in the matter of appointment to a medical professorship and when he fled the Nazis to England, yet his psychoanalytic theory privileges intrapsychic fantasies as the source of sickness in civilization; finally he did not put much stock in social facts as the cause of neuroses and psychoses. Modernist art and psychoanalysis in its classical form share the prejudice that significant reality is to be found not in empirical fact but in a complex inference drawn from mediating and disguising signs. They do not believe that it is possible to tell the significant story "straight," the story, for example, of a person's identity or a genocidal campaign. Both typically translate from a temporal series of events into a conceptual structure of explanation which is at least one remove from empirical facts. The postmodern artistic and historical temper is supposedly discontent with this consolation outside of history, but modernism in fact engendered two very different species of postmodern artistic reac-

The invisible helping hand: The role of communication in the health and social service professions

Abstract: Communication research in the health and social service professions is delimited and discussed. Research areas include: doctor‐patient communication; nurse‐patient communication; communication with the elderly and in health organizations; health information acquisition and health campaigns; and communication concerns of social workers and family counselors. Overall, the research tends to be problem‐oriented, but simplistically conceptualized. As a result, it does not provide enough assistance to the professional. The research appears to reveal a prejudice of the researchers, as well—the blame for problematic interaction lies with the professional rather than the dyad. The small amount of research in the social services may be due to the lack of interest of communicologists in the problems facing, as Hubert Humphrey called them, those in the shadows of life.

The social dimension: Political ideology: social psychological aspects

Abstract: Over forty years ago, Karl Mannheim criticized American sociology in terms which could with justice be applied to the dominant trends of today's social psychology. American sociology, according to Mannheim, ignored the problem of ideology, by refusing to enquire ‘how human consciousness is shaped and determined by the social struggle’ (1953 edn: 191–2). Mannheim accused American sociology of possessing an ‘exactitude complex’, ‘an excessive fear of theory’ and ‘a methodological ascetism’ which together had produced a discipline aiming ‘in the first place at being exact, and only in the second place at conveying a knowledge of things’ (pp. 189f). If it is accepted that contemporary social psychology has likewise placed methodological rigour above theory, then it is possible to offer broad reasons why this should have led to a lack of concern with the issue of ideology. In the first place, it can be argued that social psychology's ascetic concern with laboratory experiments acts as a barrier to the study of ideology because the experimental approach aims to break down complex phenomena into simpler component parts in order to isolate individual variables. This procedural atomism is well suited to investigating attitudes or beliefs, which conventionally are defined as dispositions towards a particular object (e.g. Smith 1968). In contrast, ‘ideology’ refers to patterns or gestalts of attitudes, and as such embraces a number of topics which are usually separated in social psychological analyses.

Racial Prejudice, Interracial Contact, and Personality Variables

Abstract: This study examined the relationship of the racial prejudice of school-age children to the actual race of the child, interracial contact, grade, sex, intelligence, locus of control, anxiety, and self-concept. A scale was devised to measure five facets of racial prejudice: a total index of racial prejudice, dating and marriage, school, social relationships, and racial interactions in restaurants. The subjects were 93 black children and 307 white children in grades 6 through 10. The results indicated that white students appear to be more prejudiced than blacks in situations requiring prolonged interracial contact; however, no differences were noted in circumstances involving minimal intimate social relationships for short periods of time. No differences in prejudice were found among grade levels; however, females were generally less prejudiced than males. Black males of low prejudice were more intelligent, more external, and less anxious than black males of higher prejudice. It is suggested that integration...

Racism and colonialism : essays on ideology and social structure

Abstract: I: Introduction.- 1. Reflections on a Theme.- II: Ideology.- 2. Racism in Europe.- 3. Colour Prejudice and the Yardstick of Civility: the Initial Dutch Confrontation with Black Africans, 1590-1635.- 4. Racism from the enlightenment to the Age of Imperialism.- 5. The French Colonial Empire and the French World-View.- III: Social Structure.- 6. Pre-industrial and Industrial Racial Stratification in South Africa.- 7. Race and Class in the Post-emancipation Caribbean.- IV: The Acceptance of Ideology.- 8. Race and Tribe in Southern Africa: European Ideas and African Acceptance.- 9. Ethnicity and Racialism in Colonial Indian Society.- 10. From Peau Noire to Po' White.- V: Conclusion.- 11. Racism and the Structure of Colonial Societies.- Notes on the Contributors.

Race and the Victorians

Abstract: These two quotations neatly summarise the main problems associated with Victorian pronouncements on race: that is, their frequent imprecision yet their obvious importance and unpleasant implications. While the words race, racism, ethnocentrism, stereotype and prejudice will be used here according to the modern definitions offered in the editor’s Introduction, it should be borne in mind that nineteenth-century observers generally simply spoke of race and races. Nor did they perceive the same models and patterns of race relations as recent scholars, despite the Victorian passion for elaborate racial and linguistic hierarchies. Instead, race often became merely a vague but potent force; an explanation of differences and antagonisms between human groups, and a concept whose importance was understandably debated by Britons who had little acquaintance with ‘inferior’ races at home but controlled, with minimal numbers, a greatly extended empire overseas.

Psychological aspects of racism in the international perspective.

Abstract: In the early development of the child, the family plays a fundamental part in laying the foundation of attitudes which serve the purpose of helping the child to behave appropriately to situations which may be a threat to him; one such attitude is racism. On the one hand racism builds a strong bond among individuals of the same race, but on the other hand it can put strong barriers between people belonging to different races. The prejudice against other racial groups usually lurks under the surface in the human mind, but certain factors may cause this to explode into deep hatred and violence. In this paper, the psychological causes of prejudice and their effects are discussed.

Accent in British Television Commercials

Abstract: Television commercials can be used for studying language interaction. Accent application in television commercials is particularly interesting since it indicates a reliance on prejudice towards and against certain accents in the viewing audience. Accent use in British television commercials is studied with respect to British dialect and sociolect preferences and with respect to non‐British accents of English specifically and foreign accents generally. The implications of accent choice are investigated and discussed.

Prejudice lives: toward a philosophy of black music biography

Abstract: A deliberate ambiguity in my title compresses what I want to say here about black music biography. The title may be read as saying that prejudice continues to inhabit biographies of black musicians, but it may also be read as an imperative with "prejudice" a verb and "lives," as the plural of "life," its object. On that reading, the title exhorts biographers to produce biographies informed by prejudice. I intend both readings. Unexamined prejudices inform the biographies of black American musicians, and prejudices, as our only opening to experience, not only do inform biographies, but must. Consider a representative passage from Laurraine Goreau's 1975 biography of Mahalia Jackson, Just Mahalia, Baby. Young Mahalia has just lost a favorite cousin to wanderlust; she has been forced to leave school without completing the fourth grade, and she must stay home to do housework for the aunt with whom she lives. Goreau writes:

[Treatment methods: traditional and alternative].

Abstract: When choosing a mode of treatment the clinician should consider the basis upon which effectiveness may be expected: (1) unproven clinical experience, (2) rationale based etiology/pathogenesis, or (3) controlled therapeutic experiments. Many therapies are still based on unproven clinical experience, which may be fallacious because of: (1) insufficient insight into the natural course of the condition, (2) statistical variation, (3) placebo effects and (4) the prejudice or bias of the clinician. Against this background the so-called alternative modes of treatment are discussed with special attention to acupuncture and homeopathy. The literature supports the conclusion that from a scientific point of view there is no place for these modes of treatment in (veterinary) medicine. Suggested explanations for the growth of alternative modes of treatment include the changing relation between veterinarians and patients/clients, the shortcomings and limitations of veterinary medicine, and increased interest in what is happening outside the regular culture pattern. Finally, it is proposed that what sets the art of (veterinary) medicine above ordinary (veterinary) medicine is that which can be achieved by good intellectual and emotional contacts between the veterinarian and the patient/client rather than by false therapies.

Resources for Teaching about Anti-Racism and Mutliethnic Education: Recent Outstanding Materials from Britain Selected Especially for American Teachers.

Abstract: This annotated list of resources for teachers is the product of several educators' efforts to promulgate the recent work being done in Britain in multicultural/multiethnic education, world studies, development studies and intercultural perspectives. An introduction cites appropriate texts for discussing race relations in the classroom. Section I, Multiethnic Education and Anti-Racist Teaching: Current Theories and Practice, describes 14 texts, ranging from an account of migrant labor in Europe to a book on print and prejudice. Section II, Curriculum Approaches in Multiethnic Teaching, describes 18 titles including a handbook on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, a resource book on multiethnic education, and a book on supporting children's bilingualism. Section III, Curriculum Materials for Schools: World Studies, introduces 14 titles, among them b,)oks on religion in the multi-faith school, black settlers in Britain, and pop, rock and ethnic music in school. (RDN) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * *************************************************w*****************4.***

Precedents and Professors—The Struggle Over Common Ground

Abstract: If I understand the outlook of Professors Baker, Robinson, and Weimer correctly, all three are either proteleology or at least willing to look at this possibility in psychological theorizing. They just do not care for what I am doing in this regard. I had asked the editors of this journal to seek comments from colleagues on the other side of the question, hoping to engage them in debate that might have some influence on the thinking of my opponents, as well as on my own. As one oriented to dialectical human reasoning, I believe that much is to be gained from such oppositional exchanges (see, e.g., Rychlak, 1972). Apparently, we were unable to draw the other side into such discussion. But never mind: I am up to my neck in debate with my own kind. My present critics have found my ideas and empirical tests seriously wanting. My presentation also seems to have led to misunderstandings. I hope that my own shortcomings will not prejudice the reader against further consideration of telic explanation in human behavior. I thank my critical colleagues for taking the time to read my paper and to comment as they have done. I hope that this opportunity for a rejoinder will reassure the reader that my scholarship and my way of reaching for the telic human image are not so deficient as my colleagues make them out to be.