ABSTRACT
Generations of thinkers have grappled with the problem of racial and ethnic identity. The black scholar, W.E.B. du Bois, highlighted the dilemma within his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk. The Negro is a sort of seventh son, bom with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. Central to the perception of human groups and their differences is the process of stereotyping. In cognitive psychology stereotypes are taken to be schemas (cognitive structures that represents an organised knowledge about a given concept or type of stimulus) or sets which play a part in cognition, perception, memory and communication. Identity is an extremely elusive and abstract concept, and as there is no acceptable model of it.
