Journal of Social Issues最新文献

This article addresses the complex issue of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data collection in workplaces, highlighting the intricate balance between fostering inclusion and mitigating potential harm and exclusion.¹ This tension manifests uniquely across diverse cultural, legal, and organizational settings. We review existing literature, offer practical guidance for decision-makers, and outline future research avenues. While SOGI data collection in workplaces can enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and elevate the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) employees, challenges include the risk of discrimination, privacy concerns, and linguistic complexities. To address these, researchers and practitioners must consider the purpose, language, and cultural context of data collection, involving LGBTIQ+ stakeholders, and conducting reconnaissance studies. Future research opportunities lie in understanding employee willingness to share SOGI data, motivations of human resource (HR) and DEI professionals, and the impact on organizational culture. Reimagining LGBTIQ+ research to ease the tension between inclusion and protection, we conclude that responsible SOGI data collection demands a nuanced approach that prioritizes inclusion and equity while addressing privacy concerns and potential harm.

Salter, P. S., Moadel-Attie, R., Miller, A. L., Brenick, A., & Bonam, C. M. (2024). Focusing the critical race psychology lens: CRT and the psychological study of social issues. Journal of Social Issues, 80, 7−17. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12609

Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the US Census Bureau.

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a renewed and more mainstream attention to systemic racism emerged. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has permeated the larger public discourse around race more than ever before. Yet, social, scientific, and political backlash intended to silence conversations about the systemic and power-driven nature of racism have also characterized these years. 30+ years have passed since CRT's introduction as a critical analysis of how the legal system fails minoritized groups; 20+ years have passed since CRT's introduction into the social psychological field. Although psychology provides a strong foundation for the CRT tenets, incorporating CRT into the field of psychology has lagged behind many other fields (e.g., sociology, education). In two installments, this special issue (re)introduces psychological researchers to CRT and Psychological Critical Race Theory (PCRT), underscores CRT's importance and limitations in the context of psychological research, features novel applications and directions in CRT, and addresses the current political climate of opposition to discussions of CRT. This second installment looks outward highlighting psychological research applying (P)CRT frameworks to advance racial justice. We conclude with reflections on the history of CRT and PCRT and the shifts necessary in our scholarship-activism to dismantle systems of racial oppression.

Using autoethnography and a Critical Race Theory framework, I recount how I experienced racism denial in my son's school district during 2019–2020 (his kindergarten year). To build this counternarrative, I analyzed multiple data sources (e.g., field notes, personal journal entries, public documents) and, across three chapters, describe my interactions with key school district gatekeepers while advocating for racial equity-oriented school policies. These policies included: a school desegregation program (Chapter 1), a plan to incorporate critical race education into one school's curriculum (Chapter 2), and a district-level endorsement of critical race and ethnic studies K-12 curriculum in California schools (Chapter 3). In responding to this advocacy, the district professed surface-level support for racial equity, but I saw this form of support as racism denial merely masquerading as support for racial equity. I explain why I interpreted the district's responses in this way, and how I experienced these responses from my perspective as a mixed Black mother, scholar, and activist. I end by reflecting on how these experiences forced me to integrate my mother-scholar-activist identities in uncomfortable and productive ways, and with recommendations for how psychological researchers and K-12 schools can support racial equity.

Psychological Critical Race Theory (PCRT) was introduced in 1998. PCRT illustrates the integral connection of psychological research and theory to the legal framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Five tenets of PCRT were described: (1) Spontaneous and persistent influence of race; (2) Fairness is derived from divergent racial experiences; (3) Asymmetrical consequences of racial policies; (4) Paradoxes of racial diversity; and (5) Racial identity requires a multidimensional approach. These tenets are reviewed and updated. A new set of seven PCRT principles are proposed that provide a broad framework within which to examine the PCRT concept and its role in reframing critical approaches to racial justice. Principle 1: Race and culture make each other up; Principle 2: Meaning Matters; Principle 3: Multilevel analysis is critical to unraveling Systemic Racism; Principle 4: Activism is a lever for social change; Principle 5: Power drives racial inequality; Principle 6: Storytelling disrupts status quo narratives; Principle 7: Diversity does not ameliorate systemic racism. PCRT is a 100-year enterprise of psychological science, offering a complex and comprehensive framework for understanding and ameliorating persistent racial inequality. The comprehensive network of ideas, methods, goals, and strategies can engage and guide this work for years to come.

Increased anti-Blackness, including interpersonal racist encounters and macro forms such as extrajudicial killings by the state, have demonstrated that Black communities and their psychological well-being are in a precarious position. Extant research has revealed that increased encounters with anti-Blackness are related to excessive psychological stress. However, the role of stigma awareness, its relationship to anti-Blackness and psychological stress, and our understanding of the relationship among subgroup identities (e.g., gender) remain underdeveloped. Appropriately, the current work adopted critical race psychology and minority stress theory and explored Black individuals’ (N = 410) experience with anti-Blackness, stigma awareness, and their relationship to psychological stress. Results demonstrated that experience with anti-Blackness was positively associated with increased physical, emotional, and cognitive stress; however, stigma awareness mediated only emotional stress. In addition, among the sample, Black men and Black individuals with increased education (e.g., received a college degree) reported increased levels of psychological stress compared to Black women and less educated Black individuals.

Despite consensus that parent involvement is integral to children's educational success, Black parents’ involvement remains largely characterized from a deficits-based perspective. Using critical race and critical consciousness theories, this study explored parents’ analysis of educational inequities and their school engagement. Using interview data from a sample of Black parents (n = 20), emergent understandings of parents’ thoughts, motivations, and actions to engage with their child's school were explored. Findings revealed that Black parents held both critical and traditional views, expressed themes of internal and external efficacy in their motivation, and engaged critically and traditionally in their child's education. Results are consonant with literature on Black parents’ engagement and to the nascent understanding of how parents' beliefs about structural racial oppression within schools impacts how they engage in that space.

Sambaraju, R. (2024). “My mother did not have civil rights under the law”: Family derived race categories in negotiating positions on Critical Race Theory. Journal of Social Issues, 80, 218–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12607

In the initial publication of this article, the extracts were missing. They have now been added to the article online. The page numbers in the PDF reflect the updated article length following issue publication, not the article's page numbers in the initial issue publication.

A core tenet of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an understanding of systemic racism as a defining and constitutive feature of the Eurocentric modern order. In contrast to this foundational insight, discussions in hegemonic social psychology tend to approach racism in a manner—specifically, as prejudice and individual bias—that abstracts the topic from social and historical context. We consider this proposition via an analysis of standard textbooks for undergraduate courses in social psychology. Our review reveals that standard textbooks do not include racism, per se, as a topic of investigation; instead, they tend to consider racism-relevant topics as specific cases of supposedly more basic (and therefore more general) processes of cognition or affect. We conclude the article by drawing on textbooks from South African settings and perspectives of decolonial theory (i.e., examples of social psychologies Other-wise) as resources to re-think hegemonic social psychology in directions that resonate more clearly with a CRT emphasis on the systematicity of racism.

Through a Critical Race Theory perspective, we investigated how racial ideology, in particular colorblind ideology, was present in Black forgiveness narratives for racial violence. We collected United States news articles from two high profile cases of Black forgiveness (N = 122), the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the killing of Botham Jean. We used a thematic analysis to address an overarching research question of: In what ways are these Black forgiveness narratives reflective of racial ideologies that may pressure or misrepresent Black forgiveness? Our results suggested that colorblind ideologies were present in representations of Black forgiveness. Colorblind representations of Black forgiveness ignored and diminished the racial context of the cases, reinforced false equivalencies through Christian messaging, perpetuated Black forgiveness as a palatable path to peace, and maintained a perception of White virtue and morality despite racial violence.