ABSTRACT
The social psychology of racism has received considerable attention from researchers, largely since the Second World War. This work has been based mainly in theories of personality (Adorno et al., 1950), attitude theory (Allport, 1954) and, more recently, social cognition and social identity theories (Hewstone and Brown, 1986; Hogg and Abrams, 1988; Tajfel, 1982; Tajfel and Turner, 1986; Turner, 1987). However, these theories have been extensively criticised by authors from within a perspective which views racism and ‘race’ as socially and culturally constructed (Billig et al., 1988; Henriques et al., 1984; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Such critics accuse mainstream psychological theories of racism for falling into the trap of an ‘individual-society dualism’ and concentrating on ‘the individual’ as their site of investigation (Henriques et al., 1984). This concentration reduces the problem of prejudice to one of ‘natural cognitive error’ within the individual (Billig, 1985), thus suggesting that it is an unfortunate yet inevitable part of human thinking (Ahmed et al., 2000).
