Multicultural Psychology. Jennifer T. Pedrotti
one or two things to try this week to further your knowledge in this area. Try to choose something that requires you to stretch a little—if it seems very easy to you, move up a level. When you are finished with the exercise, write a journal entry about what it was like for you and about what questions you still have.
Participation: Gather more information for yourself on the topics below. You might try a mere Google search at first, and then dive more deeply into authors who study these important concepts. Some authors who study these areas are listed next to each topic. In addition, consider doing your own PsycINFO search or look for reference books on these topics in your local library.
Scientific racism (Stephen Jay Gould, R. M. Dennis, Frederick Douglass)
Explaining differences to children (Rebeca Bigler, Tony Brown and colleagues)
DNA testing issues (e.g., Sheldon Krimsky, https://now.tufts.edu/articles/pulling-back-curtain-dna-ancestry-tests)
Conceptual equivalence (Sam M. Y. Ho, C. Harry Hui, Harry C. Triandis)
The Fourth Force (Paul Pedersen, Derald Wing Sue)
Initiation: Think of someone you know who is different in some way from you in terms of your culture sketch. Find a time to start a conversation with this person about how her or his experience might differ from yours. You could ask the person to complete a culture sketch as well, and then talk about your differences. Which identities feel salient for this person? Which are salient for you? Why?
Activism: Choose a topic like “scientific racism” or “the White Standard” as the basis of a presentation or essay in another class, as an editorial for your campus newspaper, or as a topic of discussion in your friendship group. Prepare with statistics, terms, and details.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure
The horizontal axis ranges from 50 to 275 in square millimeters in increments of 25. The vertical axis ranges from 50 to 350 square millimeters in increments of 25. All data are approximate.
Most plots for White female are concentrated between the horizontal axis values of 100 square millimeters and 200 square millimeters, and between the vertical axis values of 150 square millimeters and 330 square millimeters. Some plots are scattered at high values of horizontal and vertical axes.
Most plots for Black male show an increasing trend between the vertical axis values of 150 square millimeters and 260 square millimeters. The horizontal axis range for the vertical axis value of 150 square millimeters is between 100 square millimeters and 175 square millimeters. The horizontal axis range for the vertical axis value of 260 square millimeters is between 190 square millimeters and 205 square millimeters. Some plots are scattered at low values of horizontal and vertical axes.
Back to Figure
The horizontal axis ranges from 0 to 225 in square millimeters in increments of 25. The vertical axis ranges from 0 to 325 square millimeters in increments of 25. All data are approximate.
The plots for White female, White male, Black female, and Black male are in the same cluster, and show an increasing trend. They are scattered between the horizontal axis values of 100 square millimeters and 200 square millimeters, and between vertical axis values of 175 square millimeters and 300 square millimeters.
Most plots lie on the left side of the best fit line that passes through (25, 35) and (225, 280).
2 Race: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations
iStock/NK08gerd
Learning Objectives
Identify examples of racial segregation today, and analyze the role of our historical context in creating and maintaining contemporary segregation.
Define race, and utilize that definition to discuss its implications on personal identity and our social context.
Explain the historical frameworks that established the foundations for today’s racial inequality.
Describe the racial history for American Indians, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx populations.
Years ago, a White friend of mine told me the story of the day she began to see herself as White and realized that race was at work all around her. It was a surprising story, because my friend was famous for believing racism was a thing of the past, or would soon be, with people like her who treated others with fairness and respect and ignored race. Everything changed for her when her car broke down in what was considered the “bad part of town.” She had been driving through the Black neighborhood of our city, despite having been taught by her parents and friends to take the interstate (a longer route) to avoid it. The car was able to make it into the parking lot of a liquor store and then just died.
Though it was in the middle of day, she had never stopped in the Black neighborhood alone before, and she found herself surprised by her growing fear. A Black store employee came out and brought her a bottle of water and offered to call someone if she needed. While she waited for help, two young Black men approached her. Afraid, she turned away from them and did not speak. Much to her surprise, they came up and said they had seen her car in distress and wondered if they could help. As they were checking out the car, the police pulled into the lot. The officers got out of the car, put their hands on their guns and ordered the men to the ground. The gentlemen were handcuffed and pushed to the sidewalk to sit on the curb. At that point, the police turned to my friend and asked if she was okay. She explained the situation and then watched as the officers gathered identifications and information from the two men and called in on their car radio before letting them go.
In 2009, historian Bill Rankin released a project called “Radical Cartography,” central to which was a map of Chicago that used colored dots to represent the racial makeup of the city. Using the categories of: White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Other, Rankin’s dot mapping revealed not only the racial segregation of the city, but the clear and stark lines that divide us.
Soon, others developed similar maps of various cities in the United States, and in 2013, Dustin Cable, of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, published a map of the entire United States with a dot for every individual counted in the previous census. That work became part of a renewed national discussion on racial segregation. Despite the fact that the segregation reflected in the maps is historically entrenched, and that we have long examined the policies and social ideologies that created it, and that countless present-day studies reveal the various manifestations of it (from an increasing racial wealth gap to continued, and in some cases even worsening, school segregation (Orfield, Ee, Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2016)—for some it felt like the maps presented new or unrealized information. The strong concentration of colors, the clear segregation, and the stark separations had a visceral impact, for some sadness and anger, for others shock and surprise.
It was as if the expanded awareness and opportunities our contemporary technology and global marketplace provided (designer patterns purported to be “Indigenous,” the popularization of sushi, our love of guacamole, the commercialization of hip hop, etc.) had obscured the reality of the racial segregation that marks our social world and our day-to-day lives. It is a segregation not simply about space and place, but about how we see ourselves, others, and the world, and how and why we, individually and collectively, function as we do in society. The role of multicultural psychology is to assist in understanding those relationships between individuals and their personal, as well as social (culture, class, race, gender, etc.), structural (systems, institutions, ideologies, policies, etc.), and historical context.
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