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Key points
- Psychology has traditionally adopted a perpetrator perspective in its study of racism, focusing on the drivers of dehumanization and oppression.
- Overall, psychology has failed to adequately recognize or incorporate the perspectives of victimized groups.
- Psychology must adopt an interdisciplinary, power-centered framework that challenges harmful racist ideologies and practices.
Social psychology has long aimed to understand the origins and impacts of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. However, the field has traditionally adopted a perpetrator perspective in its study of racism, focusing on the psychological motives and tendencies that lead groups to dehumanize and oppress others. While this research has provided insight into the harms of racism, it has failed to adequately recognize or incorporate the perspectives of victimized groups. Racism is not simply a result of biases and indifferences in dominant groups, but a systemic structure of oppression that dominates and harms the lives of minorities. Acknowledging this requires centering the experiences of marginalized groups and making commitments to justice in how racism is studied and addressed within psychology.
As a discipline historically shaped by Western cultural norms and politics, social psychology has reflected the racial privileges and indifference of dominant groups in how racism has been framed and researched. There is extensive work on concepts like prejudice, stereotypes, and racial biases that assumes these dynamics reflect universal psychological tendencies toward in-group favoritism or out-group discrimination, rather than a means of maintaining oppressive power structures. Racism is thus presented as inevitable to human tribalism or self-interest rather than tied to its origins in colonial violence and injustice, obscuring the systemic and institutional nature of oppression.
These frameworks fail to recognize minorities as experts in the functioning and impacts of racism, or to acknowledge the profound harms racist systems enact on health, development, and well-being. Research continues to rely on members of dominant groups as participants and decision-makers while objectifying or pathologizing minorities within the scope of study. Concepts like racial trauma, internalized oppression, racial resilience, and post-traumatic growth are rarely incorporated or understood as reflecting the psychological effects of broader structures of domination rather than individual tendencies, pathology, or cultural differences alone.
Social psychology must refocus its study of racism based on a shared commitment to justice and a recognition of minorities as equal partners in knowledge production. This requires elevating work from marginalized scholars who can speak to the systemic functioning of oppression from positions of expertise. It demands methodologies and epistemologies that center victim experiences, acknowledging the psychological impacts of racist abuse, subjugation and injustice. And it necessitates reframing racism as a structure of political and social power that advantages dominant groups, not a reflection of human nature or tendencies in itself.
Only by recognizing racism's systemic and colonial origins can social psychology work toward empowerment and justice for all. This must move beyond a perpetrator perspective alone to validate minorities as knowers and incorporate their realities of oppression. It involves developing interdisciplinary approaches that tie racist ideologies, practices, and tendencies to the political and economic interests they serve in maintaining inequity. And it requires that the discipline recognizes its own history of marginalizing groups and reproducing racist systems, taking responsibility through action aimed at transforming conditions of harm and domination.
A perpetrator perspective has long dominated social psychology's study of racism, limiting understanding of racist systems and justice-centered approaches to addressing oppression. Recognizing minorities as experts, victims of injustice, and equal partners in efforts toward equity is necessary to refocus the discipline around empowerment for all. Social psychology must adopt an interdisciplinary, power-centered framework that challenges the racist ideologies, practices, and tendencies which harm humanity's diversity and potential. Only by elevating marginalized perspectives and committing to justice can the field work toward culturally-responsive insights and actions that transform oppressive structures of domination commence. The time has come for social psychology to recognize racism through the eyes of its victims, not its perpetrators alone.
