Our Racist Heart?

Download or read book Our Racist Heart? written by Geoffrey Beattie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few people today would admit to being a racist, or to making assumptions about individuals based on their skin colour, or on their gender or social class. In this book, leading psychologist Geoffrey Beattie asks if prejudice, more subtle than before, is still a major part of our everyday lives. Beattie suggests that implicit biases based around race are not just found in small sections of our society, but that they also exist in the psyches of even the most liberal, educated and fair-minded of us. More importantly, the book outlines how these ‘hidden’ attitudes and prejudices can be revealed and measured, and how they in turn predict behaviours in a number of important social situations. Our Racist Heart? takes a fresh look at our racial attitudes, using new technology and experimental approaches to show how unconscious biases influence our everyday actions and thinking. These groundbreaking results are brought to life using the author’s own experiences of class and religious prejudice in Northern Ireland, and are also discussed in relation to the history of race, racism and social psychological theory.