Critical approaches to Race

The chapter will address the ways that psychology has been involved in problematic research involving race, including eugenics and controversial work, some of which is current, which seeks to address the relationship between race and intelligence, usually concluding that ‘whites’ are more intelligent than ‘blacks’. The chapter then considers the ways in which race is used uncritically in current social psychological research as a meaningful category. This position has been heavily criticised, and it is these criticisms, based on the idea that an uncritical use of race as a category can mean that psychologists are unintentionally complicit in supporting racist ideology, that will be addressed in the following section. After that, alternatives to uncritically using race are outlined. Here is will be shown that, increasingly, critical social psychologists are paying attention to how race is understood and spoken about by speakers and what talk about race can be used to do.