Drinking from a Full Cup: Race, Racism, and Discrimination in Contemporary Social Psychological Research

Abstract

When we embarked on editing a special issue of Social Psychology Quarterly focused on race, we came to the project with a heady mix of excitement and curiosity, along with a dash of anxiety. We were excited at the prospect of seeing— and helping to shape—how research in sociological social psychology was tackling this important topic. We were curious to see how the field had developed in this area since the groundbreaking special edition of SPQ 20 years ago. And, honestly, we were a little anxious that perhaps there had not been much growth or development in how social psychologists were asking and answering questions about race, racism, and discrimination. Looking back, our excitement and curiosity proved warranted, and our anxieties were misdirected. The call for papers yielded a robust and vibrant body of research being carried out by scholars from a diverse range of career stages, institutions, backgrounds, and methodological orientations. Sociologists are producing a rich body of social psychological research grappling with questions of racial formation, racial discrimination, and race relations more broadly. Going into this process, we shared similar goals to our predecessor from 2003. We also wanted to select papers that bridged various subfields and drew from a broad range of methodological approaches. We hoped that the volume would attend to a wide range of experiences across different racial groups. And it was critical that papers did not all come from a White, ‘‘normative’’ frame of reference. These initial goals were easily met. The pool of submissions for this issue illustrated just how deeply the lessons of the 2003 special issue have shaped our subfield and structured the trajectory of social psychological research. We expanded our goals to include work that uses the topic of race to reconceptualize social psychological ideas. We also selected pieces that use social psychological theories and methods to broaden our