Confronting Racism-evasive Ignorance in Standard Pedagogy of Hegemonic Social Psychology

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.