Читать книгу Understanding Racism - Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl - Страница 37

A theory of prejudice is useful for examining how individuals and societies develop and foster negative bias based on race and/or other identities, such as gender, religion, and class. Arguably, at the root of racism are an irrational perception of and a lack of empathy for people of color, both of which the theory of prejudice help explain. The Nature of Prejudice is still widely referenced and considered a foundation for the work on prejudice; in a 25th anniversary edition of the book, Kenneth Clark, the noted psychologist whose work was used in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, noted that “its table of contents establishes the parameters for a scholarly social science approach to the discussion and understanding of this complex human problem.”³⁴ Merton’s typology, too, is still widely referenced and used in an array of sociology textbooks.