New Bridges to Build: A Note on the Social Psychology of Race, Racism, and Discrimination

Twenty years ago I had the honor and challenge of editing a special issue of Social Psychology Quarterly titled ‘‘Race, Racism, and Discrimination.’’ The core ambition at that time was to spark, solicit, and highlight work that exhibited certain bridging characteristics. In particular, my hope was to publish work that, first, spanned traditionally insular either problem-focused research, singlemethod or purely methodological work, or high-level theorizing work; second, involved multiple-group, not singleor dichotomous-group, pairings; and, third, sprung from or would amplify the perspectives of those from historically marginalized groups. In hindsight, I believe the issue was reasonably successful at pressing forward on a number of these ambitions. However one judges that earlier SPQ special issue, it is clear that important developments in both social science in general and the larger societal context warrant a focus on new and innovative analyses now underway. A variety of developments have reshaped the social research landscape with regard to race, racism, and discrimination. Sociologists devote more attention to research design and data analysis approaches that advance the goal of causal inference (Gangl 2010). A variety of ‘‘big data’’ sources are transforming the complexity and fine-grained character of analyses that social scientists can now conduct (McFarland, Lewis, and Goldberg 2015). More scholars attempt to bring mixedor multimethod research approaches to their investigations (Pearce 2012). Yet, not all important social scientific trends of the past two decades are about data and analytical methods. There has been a very significant reassertion of the importance of the groundbreaking theoretical ideas and work of W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founding luminaries of sociology (Morris 2015). Similarly, a growing number of journal outlets, in part a reflection of the increasing diversity of those scholars doing important work in this arena, are very much part of the recent change.