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Previous research indicates that racial and ethnic prejudice continues to be prevalent in U.S. society; however, the social-psychological processes of prejudice are not fully understood. Furthermore, much research on prejudice focuses on white against black prejudice, at the exclusion of other minority groups. The purpose of this chapter is to explore white prejudice against Latinos using in-depth interview data with college students. Findings indicate that many participants describe instances in which they felt prejudice, yet they use creative mechanisms to justify their prejudice or construct it as something other than prejudice. Mostly, participants described their own prejudice as a “special type” of prejudice – including trait prejudice, situational prejudice, reciprocal prejudice, and recovered prejudice – that is distinct from ordinary prejudice. By describing their own prejudice as a “special type,” participants are able to construct themselves as nonprejudiced individuals while simultaneously acknowledging their prejudice.

After war, societies can undergo change that extends justice to formerly excluded groups. Using theories of moral exclusion and moral inclusion as a lens, this chapter examines societal change in two consecutive periods after the American Civil War (1861–1865): Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Focusing on the well being of black Americans in the American South, this chapter examines Reconstruction's inclusionary gains and setbacks. It then describes challenges faced by black Americans during Jim Crow, a period of white supremacy and violence, and factors associated with Jim Crow's decline. Applying social psychological theory to these historical periods offers insight into the dynamics of inclusionary and exclusionary change.

A devastating racial logic remains at play in the moment of a “post-civil rights” Black presidency. Barack Obama's ascent has amplified a national mythology of racial progress in the US multiculturalist age. This mythology has fundamentally undermined both the credibility and critical traction of existing scholarly-activist languages of racism, antiracism, white supremacy, and institutionalized racial dominance. Thus, the discourse of national-racial vindication that animates Obama's ascendance can and must be radically opposed with creative historical narrations. These narrations must attempt to explain how and why systems of racial dominance and state-condoned, state-sanctioned racist violence remain central to the shaping of our present tense. The chapter approaches this problematic by examining how the historical social logics of racial chattel slavery cannot be historically compartmentalized and temporally isolated into a discrete “past,” because they are genocidal in their structuring and are thus central to the constitution of our existing social and cultural systems. The apparatus of the North American racial chattel institution must be theorized in its present tense articulations because its logics of power, domination, and violence have never really left us. The essay offers a schematic elaboration of this reconceptualization of racial genocide focusing on how the slavery's abolition in the latter-19th century provides the political, cultural, and legal basis for slavery's “reform” into the apparatuses of policing, criminalization, widespread and state-sanctioned antiblack bodily violence, and ultimately massive imprisonment. This examination allows for an elaboration of how slavery's genocidal social logics permeate the present tense social formation, particularly at the site of massive racial criminalization and imprisonment.

Williams was a black feminist pragmatist who contributed to and drew on the ideas and practices of the “Hull-House school of race relations” (HHSRR). This American theory unites liberal values and a belief in a rational public with a co-operative, nurturing, and liberating model of the self, the other, and the community, based on the historical ideas and commitments of abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln. Education and democracy are emphasized as significant mechanisms to organize and improve society, especially the relations between black and white people. This school had a distinct institutional influence, structure, and status (Deegan, 2002b). As an African American women who wrote and spoke using feminist pragmatism as it applied to the black experience viewed from her lived standpoint, she developed black feminist pragmatism (Deegan, 2002a). I concentrate here on her writings on biculturalism, especially her (Williams, 1907) essay on the perils of “a White Negro.” She wrote about this anomalous racial category in a number of other pieces that I also analyze here.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

The Evil Queen is a staple character in many fairy tales, but perhaps one of her most famous incarnations is as Snow White's evil stepmother. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of gender and morality in this story, this chapter analyses three different versions of the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the Brothers Grimm's nineteenth-century text, Disney's 1930s film adaptation, and The Snow Queen's Shadow, a contemporary novel based loosely on a mix of well-known European fairy tales. The chapter explores what, exactly, marks the Queen as evil in the different versions, how her morality interacts with questions of gender and cultural context, and how the different versions portray the relationship – and often the moral dichotomy – between the Evil Queen and Snow White.

Recent guidelines suggest that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has a pivotal role to play in the treatment of common mental health problems (CMHPs). There is a danger that we simply ask for ‘more of the same’ instead of looking at all the current limitations preventing individuals from accessing appropriate help. Doing this leads us to aim for a more radical and innovative approach to the CMHPs. This paper suggests that progress in primary care mental health has been much more limited than mental health workers and, in particular, researchers often acknowledge. It looks at the major obstacles barring the way to the development of services that could meet the needs of the very large number of people in our communities with CMHPs.

Why do so many African Americans get stuck near the bottom or at the middle of the corporate ladder? Why do so many continue to complain about discriminatory pay and promotion decisions many decades after the enactment of anti-discrimination laws? Law and economics commentators who have written about the issue of employment discrimination have failed to address the complexity of the problem of implicit bias and the effects of the frequently inaccurate heuristics used by some white workers when making judgments about their black colleagues. Economic theory without context is useless. But with context, law and economic analysis can help us understand and address specific problems like workplace discrimination that persist within corporate cultures because of an overestimation of the cost of anti-discrimination efforts and an underestimation of the gravity and likelihood of workplace discrimination.

In this chapter, I explore the economic and socioeconomic reality of African American low and mid-level corporate managers in order to capture a more complete picture of the costs of discrimination in the corporate workplace. I also explore the heuristic assumptions that are made about African American professionals and the effects those assumptions have on the black community. Finally, to understand the gravity of the harm to individuals, their families and the communities to which they belong, narratives about the economic and psychological harm caused by discrimination are essential. I offer the narratives of six middle managers and low-level professionals who faced discrimination in the corporate workplace to provide an important context about discrimination's real costs.