7.2: Outline

7.1: Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes

A. Ethnocentrism is placing one’s own culture and the corresponding beliefs, values, and behaviors in the center; in a position where it is seen as normal and right, and evaluating all other cultural systems against it.

B. Our cultural background influences every aspect of our lives from the food we consume to the classroom.

C. Cultural imperialism is the ethnocentric imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.

D. To dismantle ethnocentrism, we must recognize that our views of the world, what we consider right and wrong, normal or weird, are largely influenced by our cultural standpoint and that our cultural standpoint is not everyone's cultural standpoint.

E. This ethnocentric bias has received some challenges recently in United States’ schools as teachers make efforts to create a multicultural classroom by incorporating books, short stories, and traditions from non-dominant groups.

1. Stereotypes

A. Stereotypes are rigid categorizations of people based on their group affiliation. We stereotype people because it streamlines the perception process.

1. Perception is the process of selecting stimuli from our environment, categorizing those stimuli, and then interpreting them.

B. Stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people.

C. Stereotypes are overgeneralized and applied to all members of a group.

D. New stereotypes are rarely created; rather, they are recycled from subordinate groups that have assimilated into society and are reused to describe newly subordinate groups.

2. Confirmation Bias

A. We seek out information that supports our stereotypes and ignore information that is inconsistent with our stereotypes.

3. Stereotypes and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation held by a person that alters his or her behavior in a way that tends to make it true.

B. When we hold stereotypes about a person, we tend to treat the person according to our expectations.

4. The Stereotype Effect

A. Our stereotypes influence not only our judgments of others but also our beliefs about ourselves, and even our own performance on important tasks.

1. Stereotype lift occurs when these beliefs may be positive, and they have the effect of making us feel more confident and thus better able to perform tasks.

2. Stereotype threat occurs these beliefs are negative, and they create negative self-fulfilling prophecies such that we perform more poorly just because of our knowledge about the stereotypes.

a. Stereotype threat is created in situations that pose a significant threat to self-concern, such that our perceptions of ourselves as important, valuable, and capable individuals are threatened.

b. Manipulations that affirm positive characteristics about oneself or one’s group are successful at reducing stereotype threat.

5. Treating individuals according to rigid stereotypic beliefs is detrimental to all aspects of the communication process and can lead to prejudice and discrimination.

7.2: Prejudice and Discrimination

1. Prejudice is a negative attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on one’s membership in a particular social group, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and many more.

2. Identifying Prejudice

A. Implicit biases operate out of our awareness, and also because people are frequently unwilling to admit that they hold them, social psychologists have developed methods for assessing them indirectly.

B. Other indirect measures of prejudice are also frequently used in intercultural communication research, for instance—assessing nonverbal behaviors such as speech errors or physical closeness.

3. Explaining Prejudice

A. We all belong to a gender, race, age, and socioeconomic group. These groups provide a powerful source of our identity and self-esteem

1. An ingroup is a group that we identify with or see ourselves as belonging to.

2. An outgroup is a group that we don’t belong to or a group that we view as fundamentally different from us.

3. Ingroup favoritism is the tendency to respond more positively to people from our ingroups than we do to people from outgroups.

B. People also make trait attributions in ways that benefit their ingroups, just as they make trait attributions that benefit themselves.

1. Ultimate attribution error is the tendency for each of the competing groups to perceive the other group extremely and unrealistically negatively.

2. When an ingroup member engages in positive behavior, we tend to see it as a stable internal characteristic of the group as a whole.

3. Similarly, negative behaviors on the part of the outgroup are seen as caused by stable negative group characteristics.

C. Authoritarianism is a personality dimension that characterizes people who prefer things to be simple rather than complex and who tend to hold traditional and conventional values.

D. Scapegoating is the act of blaming a subordinate group when the dominant group experiences frustration or is blocked from obtaining a goal.

E. Social learning theory argues that people who are prejudiced are merely conforming to the culture in which they grow up, and prejudice is the result of socialization from parents, peers, the news media, Facebook, and other various aspects of their culture.

4. Discrimination refers to the arbitrary denial of rights, privileges, and opportunities to members of these groups.

A. Examples of Discrimination

1. When we meet strangers we automatically process three pieces of information about them: their race, gender, and age.

B. Racism

1. A type of prejudice that is used to justify the belief that one racial category is somehow superior or inferior to others.

2. Racial discrimination is discrimination against an individual based solely on one’s membership in a specific racial group.

C. Sexism

1. Is prejudice and discrimination toward individuals based on their sex.

2. Common forms of sexism in modern society include gender role expectations, such as expecting women to be the caretakers of the household.

3. Sexism also includes people’s expectations of how members of a gender group should behave.

D. Heterosexism

1. Homophobia is widespread prejudice in U.S. society that is tolerated by many people and often results in heterosexist discrimination, such as the exclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people from social groups and the avoidance of LGBTQ neighbors and co-workers.

E. Agesism

1. People often form judgments and hold expectations about people based on their age.

2. Typically, ageism occurs against older adults, but ageism also can occur toward younger adults.

3. Ageism is widespread in U.S. culture and a common ageist attitude toward older adults is that they are incompetent, physically weak, and slow.

5. Types of Discrimination

A. Individual discrimination is discrimination that individuals practice in their daily lives, usually because they are prejudiced.

1. Much individual discrimination occurs in the workplace.

B. Institutional discrimination, or discrimination that pervades the practices of whole institutions, such as housing, medical care, law enforcement, employment, and education.

1. This type of discrimination does not just affect a few isolated individuals, instead, it affects large numbers of individuals simply because of their race, gender, ability, or other group affiliation.

2. Criminal Justice

a. The number of incarcerated individuals in the United States (2.3 million individuals reported as incarcerated in 2016) is higher than in any other high-income country.

b. Incarceration disproportionately impacts African American individuals with African American men six times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Hispanic White men and African American women twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white women.

3. Health Care

a. People of color have higher rates of disease and illness than whites, due in large part to institutional discrimination based on race and ethnicity.

b. These adverse health outcomes are compounded for people of color when considering the intersectionality between poor health care and incarceration.

4. Housing

a. African Americans and Latinx Americans are more likely than Whites to have their mortgage applications declined.

b. There is also evidence of banks rejecting mortgage applications for people who wish to live in certain urban, supposedly high-risk neighborhoods, and of insurance companies denying homeowner’s insurance or else charging higher rates for homes in these same neighborhoods. Practices like these are called redlining.

c. Residential segregation is widespread because of mortgage rejections and other processes that make it very difficult for people of color to move out of segregated neighborhoods and into unsegregated areas.

5. Employment

a. African Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans still have much lower earnings than Whites.

7.3: Racism and Privilege

A. Racism can be traced back to the 15th century when European imperialists set out to colonize the rest of the world.

1. Alongside these imperialist ventures, racialization also ensued, where colonized peoples were positioned as inferior.

2. This process was extended across the planet and became embedded in countries colonized by Europeans, resulting in a redistribution of world resources through the politicization of biological attributes.

B. The dynamic of racism, whereby individuals and groups of people are discriminated against and subjugated on the basis of perceived physical characteristics such as skin color, has been and continues to be a pervasive and destructive force in many human societies.

1. Racism

A. A set of economic, political, and ideological practices whereby a dominant group exercises control over subordinate groups.

B. A concept founded upon the scientifically false premises that there are physical and psychological inequalities between human races.

C. Institutional racism, refers to the way in which racial distinctions are used, whether intentional or not, to organize the policy and practice of state, judicial, economic, and educational institutions.

2. Privilege and Power

A. Power is the ability to influence others and control our lives.

1. The dominant group: white, male, Christian, middle-class, able-bodied, educated, and heterosexual have more power than others.

2. People whose cultural identities do not conform to this model are the nondominant groups and have less sociopolitical and economic power.

B. White Privilege

1. Skin color is one of the more disturbing, largely unexamined, and persistent social constructs that perpetuates discrimination and divides power.

2. Whether they realize them or not, White people enjoy societal advantages in their daily lives, simply because they are white.

3. Peggy McIntosh defines white privilege as an invisible knapsack of advantages that some people carry around.

a. They are invisible because they are often not recognized, seen as normative (i.e., “that’s just the way things are”), seen as universal (i.e., “everyone has them”), or used unconsciously.

b. To be white in America is not to have to think about it. Except for hard-core racial supremacists, the meaning of being white is having the choice of attending to or ignoring one’s own whiteness”

4. Effective change lies in making whiteness visible, by exploring it as a racial or cultural construct, and defining whiteness in a non-defensive and non-racist manner.

C. Antiracist

1. The active practice of identifying, challenging, and changing organizational structures, policies, practices, and attitudes that perpetuate systemic racism.

a. Notice differences in treatment

b. Talk about white privilege and other forms of social privilege.

c. Be willing to teach other people about privilege and power.