Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological Perspective

Theory and research in cultural psychology highlight the need to examine racism not only “in the head” but also “in the world.” Racism is often defined as individual prejudice, but racism is also systemic, existing in the advantages and disadvantages imprinted in cultural artifacts, ideological discourse, and institutional realities that work together with individual biases. In this review, we highlight examples of historically derived ideas and cultural patterns that maintain present-day racial inequalities. We discuss three key insights on the psychology of racism derived from utilizing a cultural-psychology framework. First, one can find racism embedded in our everyday worlds. Second, through our preferences and selections, we maintain racialized contexts in everyday action. Third, we inhabit cultural worlds that, in turn, promote racialized ways of seeing, being in, and acting in the world. This perspective directs attempts at intervention away from individual tendencies and instead focuses on changing the structures of mind in context that reflect and reproduce racial domination.