Discriminated Individuals: Others' Dispositional and Situational Attributions by Time and Place

We used a social psychological approach to examine keywords that across time, place, and people have been used to disempower or empower individuals. Using a consensus model and face validity, two raters chose a purposeful sample of 10 sources to do a critical case analysis (Patton, 2002) consisting of books, articles, or monographs that were located using the following labels: racism, science, history, racial identification, inferiority, social issues, phrenology, psychology, prejudice, discrimination and criminal. In all, 108 keywords were identified as uniquely describing empowering and disempowering label attributes (100% inter-rater agreement). Each keyword was classified according to term denoted by word (noun or adjective), internal and external perspective (biological or sociological), and target (humanize, genocide, dehumanize, suppression). Moreover, the purpose of this qualitative research was to identify how these terms were employed to establish a status of inferiority and to validate the suppression of native populations, minorities, and other non-White groups and target of the label given. The results mainly depicted that psychology has been used to substantiate racists agendas; however, it can promote empowerment by encouraging social awareness of the underlying racial issues.