| Description |
Recent racially charged events have brought renewed focus on racial tensions in the United States, effectively ending the myth of a postracial society. Moreover, the recalcitrance of race-relevant social problems suggests that current methods of addressing those problems are inadequate, or at least incomplete. Such is the case with the received view, social constructivism, according to which race results from historically and culturally specific practices and decision. New psychological research challenges the received view, suggesting that racial cognition results in part from psychological mechanisms that operate outside of the conscious awareness of human agents. This body of research has led to interactionist, complementarian constructivist models of race. Ron Mallon and Dan Kelly's position, "hybrid constructionism," advances the claim that "racial social roles are psychologically constrained." My position, the psychological construction of race, is committed to something more specific-that opaque psychological mechanisms are foundational to social construction, that is, that the individual psychology constructs the subsequent social constructions. In short, if hybrid constructionism is "constraint-ist," psychologically constructed race is purely constructivist. |
