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Around the globe, individuals are affected by exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice targeting individuals from racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds as well as crimes based on gender, nationality, and culture (United Nations General Assembly, 2016). Unfortunately, children are often the targeted victims (Costello & Dillard, 2019). What is not widely understood is that the intergroup biases underlying systemic racism start long before adulthood with children displaying notable signs of intergroup bias, sometimes before entering grade school. Intergroup bias refers to the tendency to evaluate members of one’s own group more favorably than someone not identified with one’s group and is typically associated with prejudicial attitudes. Children are both the victims and the perpetrators of bias. In this review, we provide evidence of how biases emerge in childhood, along with an analysis of the significant role of intergroup friendships on enhancing children’s well-being and reducing prejudice in childhood. The review focuses predominantly on the context of race, with the inclusion of several other categories, such as nationality and religion. Fostering positive cross-group friendships in childhood helps to address the negative long-term consequences of racism, discrimination, and prejudice that emerges in childhood and continues through to adulthood.
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Implicit Bias as a Cognitive Manifestation of Systemic Racism
Abstract Explicitly prejudiced attitudes against Black Americans have declined gradually since the 1960s. Yet racial disparities and racial discrimination remain significant problems in the United States. How could discrimination and disparate outcomes remain constant even while racial prejudice decreased? Two prominent explanations have emerged to explain these puzzling trends. Sociologists have proposed that disparities and discrimination are perpetuated by systemic racism, or the policies, practices, and societal structures that disadvantage some racial groups compared with others. Simultaneously, psychologists have proposed that implicit biases may sustain discrimination even in the absence of explicit prejudice. In this essay, we explore newly discovered connections between systemic racism and implicit bias, how they challenge traditional views to reorient our understanding of implicit bias, and how they shed new light on strategies to reduce bias.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2041192
- PAR ID:
- 10529831
- Publisher / Repository:
- NA
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Daedalus
- Volume:
- 153
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0011-5266
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 106 to 122
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02051
