Thesis advisor: Anderson J. Franklin / Previous research on intergroup relations between racial groups primarily focused on relations between Whites and various ethnic minority groups, studies on relations between ethnic minorities have been neglected and underexamined (Bikmen, 2011). Allport’s (1954) intergroup contact theory suggested that when the groups in contact are perceived to have similar status, contact could lead to reduced prejudice and improved intergroup relations. Asian Americans and African Americans occupy different status positions on the U.S. racial hierarchy. Although their relative status positions are important factors to consider in understanding their evaluations and interactions with each other, the influence of racial psychological factors are also important to consider because they may influence how status is perceived. Thus, the current study investigated how racial socialization, racial identity, and racial stereotypes influence contact between Asian Americans and African Americans. U.S.-born Asian American (N = 190) and African American (N = 304) adults completed an online survey containing a demographic information sheet, the Racial Socialization Influences Scale (Harrell, 1997), the People of Color Racial Identity Attitudes Scale (Helms, 1995), the Negative Attitude Toward Asians Scale (Ho & Jackson, 2001), the Anti-Black Scale (Katz & Hass, 1988), the Intergroup Contact Measure (Stathi & Crisp, 2010), and the Behavioral Intentions Scale (Esses & Dovidio, 2002). Results from multivariate multiple regression analyses suggested that racial socialization, particularly exposure to racially diverse environments, was positively related to the frequency and quality of contact, as well as willingness to engage in future contact for both Asian Americans and African Americans; whereas race-related discussions was associated with African Americans’ endorsement of Asian stereotypes. In addition, the study showed that racial identity schemas partially mediated the relationship between racial socialization and intergroup contact, and the relationship between racial socialization and racial stereotypes. Finally, findings revealed that African Americans reported more willingness to engage in future contact with Asian Americans than Asian Americans reported with African Americans. Discussions included methodological limitations, and implications for research and practice. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

This thesis aimed to investigate the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in an Australian context. The first principal aim of this thesis was to further establish the psychometric properties of the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale (Fraser & Islam, 1997b). Study 1 revealed good psychometric properties for the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale as a measure of symbolic (modern) racist attitudes in Australian populations. The study also found support for incorporating modern racism items within a 'social issues' questionnaire format to reduce reactivity concerns associated with self-report measures. The second principal aim of this thesis (Studies 2 and 3) was to explore the nature, prevalence and potential sources of contemporary racist attitudes, and associated discriminatory behaviours, in an Australian context. Study 2 detected a sizeable proportion of modern racist attitudes in both the University and ACT Secondary College student samples. The nature of modern racist attitudes in the population samples maintained clear consistencies with key tenets of contemporary theories of racial prejudice. Overall the study provided further empirical evidence of the nature, tenets and potential socio-demographic sources of modern racist attitudes in Australian populations. Study 3 explored modern racists' discriminatory behaviours in conditions of low racial salience. In an employment-hiring task, high and low prejudiced participants (university undergraduates) revealed significantly different employment hiring preferences for an Aboriginal applicant. In providing Australian empirical evidence of modern racists' discriminatory behaviours, the study also discussed methodological implications for future Australian research investigating the discriminatory behaviours of modern racists. The third principal aim of this thesis was to provide further analysis of the measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, specifically to examine concerns pertaining to the measurement of racial attitudes through implicit techniques. Implicit free-response measurement of Australian racial stereotypes in Study 4 revealed that high and low prejudiced participants (as measured by the SR-E) were equally knowledgable of the cultural stereotypes of Aboriginals, Asians and immigrants. Cultural knowledge of the implicit stereotypes was found to be predominantly independent of prejudicial beliefs, lending support to concerns (Devine, 1989; Devine & Elliot, 1995) that implicit measures of racial prejudice may actually be measuring an individual's cultural knowledge of the primed racial group, rather than his or her prejudicial beliefs. The fourth principal aim of this thesis was to investigate the content of Australian racial stereotypes. Study 4 revealed the implicit content of the cultural stereotypes of Aborigines, Asians and immigrants to be predominantly negative in nature. In response to the predominantly negative content of the Aboriginal cultural stereotype, Study 5 investigated whether the recategorising of ingroup boundaries and disconfirming information, relating to Aboriginal Australians, observed in the recent Sydney Olympic Games would result in changes to the content of the cultural stereotype. The study found significant decreases and increases in the negative and positive traits respectively reported as being part of the cultural stereotype of Aborigines, two weeks following the Sydney Olympic Games. Together, the five studies contributed to empirical research on the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in Australian populations. A number of theoretical and practical implications of the present findings for Australian prejudice research are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, a number of practical recommendations for future research are identified to further investigate the modern nature of racist attitudes in Australian populations.

The development of affordable housing often involves a contentious siting process. Proposed housing developments frequently trigger concern among neighbors and community groups about potential negative impacts on neighborhood quality of life and property values. Advocates, developers, and researchers have long suspected that some of these concerns stem from racial or class prejudice, yet, to date, these assumptions lack empirical evidence. My research seeks to examine the roles that perceptions of race and class play in shaping opinions that underlie public opposition to affordable housing. Such opposition often earns the label "Not in my Backyard" (NIMBY). The application of a mixed-methods approach helps determine why the public opposes the development of affordable housing in their neighborhoods and towns. The focus group and survey results provide a rich understanding of the underlying attitudes that trigger opposition to affordable housing when proposed nearby. This study demonstrates that stereotypes and perceptions of the poor and minorities are particularly strong determinants of affordable housing opposition. This research improves our understanding of public attitudes toward affordable housing attitudes, leading to a more focused and effective policies and plans for the siting of affordable housing. The results provide advocates, planners, developers, and researchers with a more accurate portrayal of affordable housing opposition, thereby allowing the response to be shaped in a more appropriate manner. / text

Peruvian mass media has failed in addressing and representing the cultural and ethnic diversity of its country, as the presence and representation of ethnic minorities (indigenous and Afro-Peruvian) are almost exclusively reduced to the reproduction of stereotypes in comedy shows, in which they are often racialized and the target of offenses directly related with their ethnic identities. The analysis will focus on the figure of El Negro Mama, a very popular character in Peruvian television thought to be a portrait of the Afro-Peruvian population. Through the use of textual analysis, the paper will explore of this character in order to determine the performativity of blackness in national television and the use of racist discourses in the national media and their direct relation with the reproduction of stereotypes and racist language. The research, then, seeks to provide an analysis of the transformation of the discourses that this character produced to show the variations of the racist discourse affecting this ethnic group and the transformation of the portrayals and interactions of the character when publicly rejected by the Afro-Peruvian civil society.

This thesis investigates how Pakeha-Māori have been represented in New Zealand non-fiction writing during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chronological and textual boundaries range from Arthur Thomson's seminal history The Story of New Zealand (1859) to James Belich's Making Peoples (1996). It examines the discursive inventions and reinventions of Pakeha-Māori from the stereotypical images of the Victorian era to modern times when the contact zone has become a subject of critical investigation and a sign of changing intellectual dynamics in New Zealand and elsewhere. This thesis is about the history of attitudes to culture-crossers in New Zealand, the use of the term 'Pakeha-Māori', and the images that underlie the thinking of Britons and Pakeha about them. It explores the motives and backgrounds of specific authors and the ways in which they frame New Zealand history. It elucidates the ambiguous and contradictory perspectives of Pakeha-Māori in the literature and analyses its impact on changing public perceptions about them. The study critiques the literature with emphasis on theoretically informed research, historical analysis, and literary insights. Discussion is confined to published texts, with the aim of exploring the multiplicity of Pakeha-Māori images and the processes that gave rise to them. This study is essentially an investigation into how and why historians and other scholars try to draw boundaries between cultures in order to create a satisfactory metanarrative or myth of the 'settlement' of New Zealand and thus to forge a sense of New Zealandness. The cultural and racial categories of 'Māori' and 'Pakeha' are very unstable, however, and a consideration of the 'in-between' or 'culture-crossing' category of 'Pakeha-Māori' can reveal the way in which 'Māori' and 'Pakeha' and a sense of New Zealand and New Zealanders have been constructed. More particularly, consideration of representations of those culture-crossers or race-crossers called Pakeha-Māori can reveal the hopes and fears of Pakeha writers regarding Pakeha, Māori and New Zealand and how Pakeha-Māori have frequently been a barometer or litmus test of public perceptions of relations between Māori and Pakeha in different historical periods.

Despite changes in the law and efforts by organizational diversity practitioners to expand leadership opportunities for people of color, there is still a sharp contrast in the ratio of white leaders to leaders of color. While much research exists regarding the diversity disparity in leadership, there is little research on factors that influence the motivation to lead. The purpose of this correlational study was to test critical race and leader categorization theories by comparing how the independent variables of white privilege, organizational belongingness, and racial stereotypes affected the dependent variable of motivation to lead of black American versus white American survey respondents. It was hypothesized that the independent variables correlated stronger for white Americans than for black Americans in predicting the motivation to lead. A self-selected sample of 179 adults, drawn from various industries in the United States, completed a voluntary, online survey. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey was designed to operationalize study variables and was adapted from existing instruments. Pearson correlations and a multiple linear regression aided in statistically understanding the variables' relationships. Results indicated that effects of white privilege and racial stereotypes had a statistically significant relationship with motivation to lead for black Americans, and organizational belongingness did not. Results also indicated that effects of racial stereotypes had a significant relationship with motivation to lead for the white American population while the other variables did not. This study has implications for positive social change by not only adding a sharper focus on the factors necessary for leaders of color to be successful, but also providing diversity practitioners a north star to change the leadership landscape.

In this study the experiences, perceptions and challenges of being in a mixed-race relationship (M-R) were explored against the backdrop of previous South African pieces of legislation meant to keep the various race groups apart. The study was located within a conceptual framework predominantly informed by a constructivist approach, as well as some tenets from the social constructionist approach. This study focused only on M-R relationships consisting of black and white partners. The couples were recruited through the use of a snowball sampling method. In-depth interviews were used as the primary tool for collecting data. All participants were interviewed by the researcher either at their own homes or in the researcher's office. The collected information was later transcribed and qualitatively analysed. The results of the study indicate that individuals found their involvement in M-R relationships to be a positive experience, and thus resulting in a positive attitude change and a sense of personal growth. M-R couples and their extended families experienced cognitive dissonance which required them to discard their previously internalised racial stereotypes, using strategies such as cognitive differentiation, re-categorization and de-categorization, allowing shifts toward non-racial socially constructed categories. Most of the challenges of being in M-R relationships were experienced on interpersonal and inter-group levels. The losses, disadvantages, challenges, concerns and pains experienced by M-R couples were mainly related to family and social disapproval of the relationship as well as efforts to discourage race mixing. The study concludes that the non-conformist nature of M-R relationships requires from the participants a high level of self-differentiation and individuation that challenges racial norms and cultural collectivism. Albeit being a personal or private matter, a M-R relationship carries the burden of easily being the subject of public discourse. It is in this sense that M-R relationships cannot be understood without taking the socio-political context within which they occur into consideration. / Psychology / D.Phil. (Psychology)

In this study the experiences, perceptions and challenges of being in a mixed-race relationship (M-R) were explored against the backdrop of previous South African pieces of legislation meant to keep the various race groups apart. The study was located within a conceptual framework predominantly informed by a constructivist approach, as well as some tenets from the social constructionist approach. This study focused only on M-R relationships consisting of black and white partners. The couples were recruited through the use of a snowball sampling method. In-depth interviews were used as the primary tool for collecting data. All participants were interviewed by the researcher either at their own homes or in the researcher's office. The collected information was later transcribed and qualitatively analysed. The results of the study indicate that individuals found their involvement in M-R relationships to be a positive experience, and thus resulting in a positive attitude change and a sense of personal growth. M-R couples and their extended families experienced cognitive dissonance which required them to discard their previously internalised racial stereotypes, using strategies such as cognitive differentiation, re-categorization and de-categorization, allowing shifts toward non-racial socially constructed categories. Most of the challenges of being in M-R relationships were experienced on interpersonal and inter-group levels. The losses, disadvantages, challenges, concerns and pains experienced by M-R couples were mainly related to family and social disapproval of the relationship as well as efforts to discourage race mixing. The study concludes that the non-conformist nature of M-R relationships requires from the participants a high level of self-differentiation and individuation that challenges racial norms and cultural collectivism. Albeit being a personal or private matter, a M-R relationship carries the burden of easily being the subject of public discourse. It is in this sense that M-R relationships cannot be understood without taking the socio-political context within which they occur into consideration. / Psychology / D.Phil. (Psychology)

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