last12monthsThePsychologyofAmericanRacismweek4.pdf

The Psychology of American Racism

Steven O. Roberts
Stanford University

Michael T. Rizzo
New York University and Beyond Conflict Innovation Lab,

Boston, Massachusetts

American racism is alive and well. In this essay, we amass a large body of classic and
contemporary research across multiple areas of psychology (e.g., cognitive, developmental,
social), as well as the broader social sciences (e.g., sociology, communication studies, public
policy), and humanities (e.g., critical race studies, history, philosophy), to outline seven
factors that contribute to American racism: (a) Categories, which organize people into distinct
groups by promoting essentialist and normative reasoning; (b) Factions, which trigger
ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition and threat; (c) Segregation, which hardens racist
perceptions, preferences, and beliefs through the denial of intergroup contact; (d) Hierarchy,
which emboldens people to think, feel, and behave in racist ways; (e) Power, which legislates
racism on both micro and macro levels; (f) Media, which legitimize overrepresented and
idealized representations of White Americans while marginalizing and minimizing people of
color; and (g) Passivism, such that overlooking or denying the existence of racism obscures
this reality, encouraging others to do the same and allowing racism to fester and persist. We
argue that these and other factors support American racism, and we conclude with sugges-
tions for future research, particularly in the domain of identifying ways to promote
antiracism.

Public Significant Statement
In the United States of America, racism is alive, well, and increasing. To reduce American racism,
one must examine and understand the psychological and sociocultural forces that enable it. This essay
amasses a large body of classic and contemporary research to provide a straightforward overview of
those forces.

Keywords: America, racism, antiracism, development

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt of a United States in which
children of all races could join hands as equals. More than
half a century later, this dream has yet to become reality. As
just a few examples, White students are perceived as more
compliant than students of color, which decreases their
likelihood of being expelled (Okonofua, Walton, & Eber-
hardt, 2016). White homeowners are perceived as cleaner

and more responsible than homeowners of color, which
increases their home equity (Bonam, Bergsieker, & Eber-
hardt, 2016). And White criminals are perceived as less
blameworthy than criminals of color, which decreases their
likelihood of being executed (Baldus, Woodworth, Zucker-
man, Weinder, & Broffit, 1998; Scott, Ma, Sadler, & Cor-
rell, 2017). Simply put, American racism is alive and well
(Eberhardt, 2019). The present essay integrates classic and
contemporary research to ask a simple yet unresolved ques-
tion: Why?

We are not the first to ask this question. Half a century
ago, the American psychologist Gordon Allport published
his seminal book, The Nature of Prejudice (Allport, 1954),
in which he amassed a large body of theoretical and empir-
ical work to reveal the roots of race-based hostility. Since
the publication of his book, research spanning multiple
areas of psychology (e.g., cognitive, developmental, social),
the broader social sciences (e.g., sociology, communication
studies, public policy), and humanities (e.g., critical race

X Steven O. Roberts, Department of Psychology and Center for Com-
parative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University; Michael T.
Rizzo, Department of Psychology, New York University, and Beyond
Conflict Innovation Lab, Boston, Massachusetts.

At the drafting of this article, one author identified as Black American
and one author identified as White American. Both authors contributed
equally to this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Steven O.
Roberts, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stan-
ford Way, Building 420, Palo Alto, CA 94304. E-mail: sothello@stanford
.edu

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American Psychologist
© 2020 American Psychological Association
ISSN: 0003-066X http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000642

2021, Vol. 76, No. 3, 475-487

This article was published Online First June 25, 2020.

475

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5337-870X

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000642

studies, history, philosophy), each with their own methods
and vantage points, has unearthed new ground to reveal the
depth of these roots and the ways by which they are nour-
ished. The primary purpose of this essay is to provide an
introductory synthesis of these literatures to identify and
discuss several key psychological factors that contribute to
the perpetuation of American racism.

We begin by clarifying our terms and perspectives. First,
informed by research, theory, and philosophical discourse,
we define racism as a system of advantage based on race
that is created and maintained by an interplay between
psychological factors (i.e., biased thoughts, feelings, and
actions) and sociopolitical factors (i.e., biased laws, poli-
cies, and institutions; Alexander, 2010; Bonila-Silva, 1999;
Kendi, 2016; Salter, Adams, & Perez, 2018; Tatum, 1997).

Second, racism is not unique to the United States, al-
though we focus on the United States for three reasons: (a)
most psychological research on racism is conducted within
the United States, with few studies directly examining these
issues internationally; (b) as U.S. citizens, we acknowledge
our own positionality and limited insight into other con-
texts; and (c) a unique set of historical and sociocultural
factors (e.g., the racial conquest and enslavement of persons
of color), synergize to create a unique form of racism:
American racism1 (Bourke, 2014; Henrich, Heine, &
Norenzayan, 2010; Kendi, 2016). Thus, we focus on the
United States as both a case study and as an indictment, in
which the psychological underpinnings of racism are well-
documented, as are the unjust consequences of racial hier-
archy. We incorporate research from outside of the United
States when appropriate, but do not make any claims about
generalizability beyond the United States.

Third, racism is not inborn (Kinzler & Spelke, 2011);
Americans become more or less inclined toward racism— or
antiracism—via a culmination of factors that are deeply
woven into the fabric of U.S. society. Our view is that
American racism is reinforced by all Americans, although to
varying degrees. Just as citizens of capitalistic societies
reinforce capitalism, whether they identify as capitalist or
not, and whether they want to or not, citizens of racist
societies reinforce racism, whether they identify as racist or
not, and whether they want to or not.

Fourth, American racism advantages White Americans
and disadvantages Americans of color (Tatum, 1997). Just
as capitalism advantages the wealthy (e.g., those with the
most resources can create and regulate norms, policies, and
institutions that reinforce income inequality), American rac-
ism advantages White Americans (e.g., those with the most
social and economic power can create and regulate norms,
policies, and institutions that reinforce racial inequality).
Critically, American racism also shapes, and is shaped by,
dynamics within and between groups, and varies as a func-
tion of other social identities (e.g., racism oppresses women
of color in ways that it does not oppress men of color;

Comas-Díaz, 1994). These important intraminority and in-
tersectional components of American racism are truly de-
serving of their own review. Yet it is our view that they, too,
reinforce a racial hierarchy that advantages White Ameri-
cans (DiAngelo, 2012). This is not an indictment of any
individual White American, per se. Rather, it is to illuminate
a widespread and longstanding system of advantage. If that
system is to be eradicated, all Americans, irrespective of
their race, must acknowledge and understand the psycho-
logical and sociopolitical forces that reinforce it.

Finally, we do not review all of the factors that contribute
to American racism, of which there were many to choose
from. Our aim is to provide readers with a comprehensive
yet straightforward overview of several of the major factors
known or theorized to motivate racism as it plays out in the
American cultural context. In doing so, we hope to bring
together researchers and practitioners from diverse back-
grounds and to provide them with a single essay that serves
as a conceptual hub from which to overview the vast sea of
accumulated knowledge, as well as a shared vantage point
from which to explore new territory. We detail seven factors
that contribute to American racism: (a) Categories, (b) Fac-
tions, (c) Segregation, (d) Hierarchy, (e) Power, (f) Media,
and (g) Passivism. We present these factors sequentially for
conceptual clarity, but do not convey any ing in terms
of importance, prevalence, or developmental relevance. In-
deed, the interactive relations between these factors contrib-
ute to the specific instantiation of American racism (e.g.,
media distorts categories, segregation reflects hierarchy,
power enables passivism). We examine such interactions
when salient, though space constraints preclude a full in-
vestigation. We now turn to seven factors that create and are
created by American racism.2

American Categories

Humans are not born with racial categories in mind. They
must be learned. According to Developmental Intergroup
Theory (Bigler & Liben, 2006), people acquire racial cate-
gories because they are often (a) perceptually discriminable,
(b) disproportionate in size (i.e., categories with fewer
members are more salient), (c) explicitly and implicitly used
(e.g., if groups are segregated, one may infer that there exist
meaningful differences between them), and (d) labeled (e.g.,

1 We use the category “American” narrowly to refer to individuals in the
United States, and acknowledge that this category additionally includes
Americans from other societies (e.g., Canada, Mexico, Brazil). Indeed, an
important limitation to the existing literature is that it disproportionately
focuses on U.S. society.

2 We acknowledge the intersectional nature of racism both in the ex-
pression (e.g., differences in racist attitudes towards Black women and
Black men, straight Black women and gay Black women) and formation
(i.e., differences in the formation of racial attitudes across groups) of racial
beliefs. We incorporate these concerns into our review when space permits;
however, this important topic is truly deserving of its own extensive
review.

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ROBERTS AND RIZZO476

Asian, Black, Latinx, White; see also Aboud, 1988; Cos-
mides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003; Hirschfeld, 1995). Racial
categories are particularly important given that they are
federally sanctioned (e.g., by the U.S. Census Bureau),
easily employed by individuals, and because they directly
tell people which racial categories to form.

Category labels can promote the belief that category
members share an essence that grants them their identity
(Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017). As one example, Wax-
man (2010) introduced 4-year-old children in Chicago, Il-
linois, to White or Black individuals who were character-
ized by novel properties (e.g., likes to go glaving), and
measured whether they inferred that others of the same race
shared the property. Some children received labels (e.g.,
“This Wayshan likes to go glaving”), others did not (e.g.,
“This one likes to go glaving”). Particularly when individ-
uals were labeled, children generalized the property more
often to same-race individuals than to different-race indi-
viduals. Category labels are particularly powerful when
presented via generics (e.g., “girls” instead of “this girl” or
“these girls”) given that generics express generalizations
about a kind (e.g., Birds lay eggs, Blacks are criminal),
suggesting that a property is closely linked to a category
(e.g., laying eggs is fundamental to birds, criminality is
fundamental to Black people), despite there being consid-
erable variation among category members (e.g., most birds
do not lay eggs, including male birds, baby birds, and dead
birds, and most Black people have clean criminal records).
When preschoolers are introduced to social categories via
generics instead of specific labels, they are more likely to
infer that the category and property are linked, and that
category membership entails an underlying essence (Rho-
des, Leslie, & Tworek, 2012). Notably, children do not
thoughtlessly support essentialism across conceptual do-
mains (e.g., artifacts, hair color), but do so for the properties
their environment deems important (e.g., skin color in the
United States, religious attire in Israel; Diesendruck,
Goldfein-Elbaz, Rhodes, Gelman, & Neumark, 2013).

The link between category labels and essentialism is
important for understanding racial stereotyping, prejudice,
and discrimination (Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017). Re-
garding stereotyping, because essentialism entails the belief
that category members share properties, it predicts stereo-
typing among adults and children (Bastian & Haslam, 2006;
Pauker, Xu, Williams, & Biddle, 2016). Regarding preju-
dice, the belief that categories are natural supports the belief
that category differences are natural, which supports the
belief that racial hierarchies are natural (Mandalaywala,
Amodio, & Rhodes, 2018). Regarding discrimination, es-
sentialism predicts an exaggeration of the differences be-
tween social categories, which motivates people to avoid
interracial contact, share fewer resources with outgroup
members, and support boundary-enhancing policies (e.g.,
building a wall along the U.S.–Mexico b ), revealing

how categories shapes legal and sociopolitical actions (Rho-
des, Leslie, Saunders, Dunham, & Cimpian, 2018; Roberts,
Ho, Rhodes, & Gelman, 2017).

Category labels and generics additionally promote a
descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency (i.e., believing that
how a group is reflects how group members should be),
which supports racial stereotyping and prejudice. Roberts,
Ho, and Gelman (2017) introduced children to novel groups
(i.e., Hibbles and Glerks) characterized by different behav-
iors (e.g., the kind of music they listened to). Children
disapproved of nonconformity (e.g., a Glerk who listened to
music more typical of Hibbles) and they justified their
disapproval prescriptively (e.g., “Glerks shouldn’t do
that!”). Children were especially likely to show a
descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency when they were intro-
duced to groups via category labels or generics. Critically,
children’s negativity toward nonconforming Hibbles and
Glerks predicts their future negativity toward nonconform-
ing Black people and White people (e.g., a Black person
who listened to music more typical of White people; Guo,
Wang, Van Wye, & Roberts, 2019). Thus, labels and ge-
nerics help children develop expectations about groups,
which in turn license negativity toward individuals who
challenge those expectations (e.g., a Black person who
“acts” White; Durkee & Williams, 2015).

American Factions

Individuals do not only learn about categories. They are
also embedded within them. Almost 50 years ago, Henri
Tajfel (1970) invited 64 boys into a lecture hall in Bristol,
England and told them that he was interested in their visual
judgments. Indeed, he showed them pictures with varying
numbers of dots and asked them to estimate how many dots
were in each picture. Tajfel then told the boys how well they
estimated, but unbeknownst to them, what he told them was
random. Irrespective of how the boys actually performed,
they were randomly assigned to one of two groups: half
were told that they were “overestimators” (i.e., that they
overestimated the number of dots) whereas the others were
told that they were “underestimators” (i.e., that they under-
estimated the number of dots). The boys were next brought
into a separate room and asked to distribute money to
anonymous ingroup and outgroup members. Surprisingly,
the boys gave more money to members of their randomly
determined ingroup. This experiment served as a founda-
tional building block for research in Social Identity Theory
(Tajfel & Turner, 1979), and provided the first glimpse into
what is now widely recognized as the Minimal Groups
Phenomenon (MGP), which has been extensively replicated
in the United States and abroad.

The MGP is rooted in two general motivations that are
consequential (Dunham, 2018; Otten, 2016). First, people’s
positive perceptions of themselves often extend to positive

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AMERICAN RACISM 477

perceptions of their group, which leads to an ingroup pref-
erence. Second, because people care about cooperative al-
liances, they intuitively interpret the groups that they are
assigned to as requiring their cooperation, trust, and sup-
port, which leads to behaving in ways that benefit the
ingroup and are consistent with ingroup norms. Even after
being randomly assigned to a minimal group (e.g., via a
shirt color or a coin-toss), children and adults feel and
express positivity toward their ingroup, associate their in-
group with positivity, empathize with their ingroup, distrib-
ute resources in favor of their ingroup, and are more for-
giving of and loyal to ingroup members.

In reality, people are not randomly assigned to minimal
groups, but they are systematically assigned to socially
constructed racial groups, and many of the effects that
emerge in minimal groups contexts extend to race as well.
Dunham (2011) had White adults judge whether racially
ambiguous faces with happy or angry facial expressions
were White or Black. White adults judged that happy faces
were White (i.e., in their ingroup) and that angry faces were
Black (i.e., in their outgroup), and participants’ implicit
racial preferences predicted their tendency to associate out-
groups with anger. Critically, the desire to establish and
maintain one’s position within a group can also lead indi-
viduals to prioritize ingroup loyalty and group norms over
moral concerns for fairness and inclusion (Killen, Elenbaas,
& Rizzo, 2018). For example, children are less likely to
include an outgroup member if they believe that members of
their ingroup would disapprove (Hitti et al., 2019; Killen,
Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, Stangor, & Helwig, 2002). Notably,
ingroup biases and norms diverge as a function of power
and hierarchy. For instance, White Americans show stron-
ger ingroup preferences than Americans of color, who more
often show preferences for the outgroup (Banaji & Green-
wald, 2013; Clark & Clark, 1947). We return to this point in
subsequent sections.

Of course, groups do not exist in isolation. They interact
with other groups, which can result in group-based compe-
tition and conflict. Muzafer Sherif and colleagues (1954)
invited 12-year-old boys to a summer camp at Robbers
Cave State Park in rural Oklahoma, and divided them into
two groups. First, during the cooperation phase, each group
was unaware of the other group’s existence as they bonded
with their ingroups (e.g., through team-building activities
and discussion). During this phase, the groups established
their own names (e.g., Eagles, Rattlers), norms (e.g., swim-
ming, hiking), and symbols (e.g., clothing styles, flags).
Second, during the competition phase, the two groups were
introduced to one another and were brought into competi-
tion (e.g., sporting events), thereby inducing a sense of
group threat. As conflict progressed, the groups began to
insult, sabotage, and attack one another.

How are groups threatened and provoked into outgroup
hostility? As reviewed by Riek, Mania, and Gaertner

(2006), intergroup tensions are particularly likely to flare
when groups experience threats to their self-image (i.e.,
esteem threats), uniqueness (i.e., distinctiveness threats),
values and beliefs (i.e., symbolic threats), or goals and
resources (i.e., realistic threats). Groups also experience
threats rooted in intergroup anxiety (i.e., when people are
uncertain of how intergroup interactions will play out, they
often feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and threatened) and neg-
ative stereotypes about the outgroup (e.g., when people
expect outgroups to behave negatively, they experience
fear, anger, and threat; Richeson & Shelton, 2007). These
threats, different in nature, are rooted in three broader
factors: (a) high-identification with one’s ingroup, (b) lim-
ited or negative experiences with intergroup contact, and (c)
hierarchical differences between groups, such that high-
status groups are more likely to perceive outgroups as
threatening than are low-status groups (see Segregation and
Hierarchy sections).

American Segregation

In the United States and across the globe, racial segrega-
tion is pervasive at macro and micro levels (Lichter, Parisi,
& De Valk, 2016). Across and within countries, states,
cities, and neighborhoods, White people are often residen-
tially segregated from persons of color. For example, there
is a lower proportion of White people living in the U.S.
South compared with the U.S. North, in Northern Italy
compared with Southern Italy, and in French metropolitan
areas compared with French rural areas. At the micro level,
in cities across the United States and Europe (e.g., Atlanta,
Orlando, Brussels, London), there is a lower proportion of
White people living in city centers than in peripheral re-
gions. Notably, racial segregation tends to be higher in the
United States than in Europe, which is a direct consequence
of racist federal, state, and local policies (Kendi, 2016).
Redlining, for example, systematically denied communities
of color access to real estate and set the precedent for a
range of federal and state policies that continue to disad-
vantage communities of color today (Rothstein, 2017). One
result of these policies is racial segregation, which denies
individuals the opportunities for interracial contact that
could challenge racist perceptions, preferences, and beliefs
(Paluck, Green, & Green, 2018; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006;
but see McKeown & Dixon, 2017).

Regarding perceptions, a lack of interracial contact pro-
motes perceptual narrowing – a phenomenon by which
attention to perceptual information is at first broadly tuned,
but then gradually becomes more selective across develop-
ment (Lee, Quinn, & Pascalis, 2017). At birth, humans
differentiate among faces of various races. With age, they
remain able to differentiate among members of familiar
races and become less able to differentiate among members
of unfamiliar races. In other words, members of unfamiliar

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478 ROBERTS AND RIZZO

races begin to “look alike.” Regarding preferences, a lack of
interracial contact prevents children from developing famil-
iarity with certain racial groups. At birth, infants attend
equally to racial ingroup and outgroup members (measured
via looking time). At 3-months, infants from racially diverse
contexts maintain this proclivity, whereas those from ra-
cially homogenous contexts (e.g., Asian infants in China,
White infants in Israel, Black infants in Ethiopia) begin to
attend more to the groups they have the most contact with
(i.e., their ingroup). Later in development, these visual
preferences may contribute to social preferences, though
more longitudinal research is needed to examine this di-
rectly (see Kinzler & Spelke, 2011). Regarding beliefs, a
lack of interracial contact promotes the belief that interracial
relationships are undesirable, if not impossible. Illustrating
this point, in one line of research, young children are shown
pictures of ambiguous scenarios (e.g., two children of dif-
ferent races on a playground, with one child standing behind
another child on the ground; McGlothlin & Killen, 2010).
What is ambiguous is whether the child standing pushed the
child onto the ground, or whether they are helping them up.
Children attending racially homogenous schools were more
likely to interpret the ambiguous situation negatively (i.e.,
infer that the standing child pushed the other child), and
were less likely to believe that children of different races
could be friends, compared with children attending racially
diverse schools, highlighting further how sociocultural con-
texts shape racist worldviews.

Critically, the biases that develop from a lack of interra-
cial contact often favor White Americans. In the United
States, White Americans are a majority (77%), whereas
Latinx Americans (18%), Black Americans (13%), Asian
Americans (6%), and Native Americans (1%) are all nu-
merical minorities (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). Accord-
ingly, most Americans have more frequent contact with
White people than with people of color, which results in
more narrow perceptions, unfavorable preferences, and pes-
simistic beliefs about people of color (Lee et al., 2017). In
one classic study conducted in Baltimore, Maryland, Fein-
man and Entwisle (1976) found that, consistent with the
notion that children are better able to recognize majority
race faces, Black children were better at recognizing White
faces than White children were at recognizing Black faces.
This is consequential. In a criminal lineup, for instance,
when a suspect is not the guilty party, perceptual narrowing
for minority group members, paired with biased preferences
and beliefs, increase the odds that an innocent suspect will
be identified as the perpetrator, especially if that suspect is
Black (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Indeed, in cases where
felony convictions were overturned because of DNA evi-
dence, a significant number of those convictions were the
product of incorrect eyewitness identifications (Connors,
Lundregan, Miller, & McEwen, 1996).

American Hierarchy

All societies are hierarchically ed (Sidanius &
Pratto, 1999), and the reality that the United States is
hierarchically ed by race is uncontroversial. As noted
above, White Americans are a numerical majority, making
up roughly 77% of U.S. citizens (U.S. Census Bureau,
2011), yet they occupy the highest status positions at a
vastly disproportionate rate. As just two examples, in 2018,
97% of CEOs at Fortune 500 Companies were White (For-
tune, 2018), as were 98% of past U.S. Presidents. This
hierarchy, rooted in American history and perpetuated by
racist ideologies, practices, and policies (e.g., Plessy v.
Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education) rather than an
inherent superiority of White Americans (Alexander, 2010;
Bonila-Silva, 1999; Williams, 1987), plays a critical role in
the psychology of American racism, such that several cog-
nitive biases and social ideologies reinforce the conception
of White Americans as superior. Indeed, the status of
“American” itself is readily granted to White Americans,
and often denied to Americans of color, and particularly
Asian and Latinx Americans (Harris, Armenta, Reyna, &
Zárate, 2020; Zou & Cheryan, 2017). Because of this denial,
immigrants and refugees face a host of explicit—and often
societally sanctioned (see American Power section)—prej-
udice and discrimination, with long term consequences for
health and wellbeing (Volkan, 2018).

Children are remarkably efficient at encoding and rein-
forcing social hierarchies (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2017).
Doing so is adaptive; recognizing and supporting high-
status individuals can increase one’s own social status and
access to resources. Thus, it is no surprise that young
children and infants use a variety of cues to determine who
is high-status (e.g., numerical and physical size, the ability
to seize and control resources, and to give and win
conflicts; Gülgöz & Gelman, 2017; Pun et al., 2017). Once
status is encoded, children attribute its existence to dispo-
sitions (e.g., the high-status group must be more hardwork-
ing, dominant, and intelligent), rather than to structures
(e.g., historical events and systems of oppression), and
subsequently think, feel, and behave in ways that are
hierarchy-reinforcing (e.g., they develop preferences for,
attempt to affiliate with, and prefer to …