Thomas F. Pettigrew

Over the last century, the United States and much of the world broadly has seen massive social change with respect to attitudes and beliefs about anti-Black racism. But change alone does not ensure a decline in racism. In Anti-Black Racism in America, renowned race relations scholar Thomas F. Pettigrew undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the key trends in racism against Black Americans, drawing on a wide range of scholarship and his own decades of experience in the field. The book describes the advances made in recent years that promise a decline in anti-Black racism--especially in politics and education, but it also highlights where American racism remains firmly entrenched--in economics, housing, and the justice system. Employing significant insights from social psychology, such as understanding implicit prejudice and the importance of intergroup contact, Pettigrew lays out a theory of racism centering the importance of segregation in housing for its perpetuation, and makes the case for reparations funded by billionaires.

Using vivid examples of both historical and current events, acclaimed scholar Thomas Pettigrew amp rsquo s compelling book advocates for a robust contextual social psychology, maintaining that far more attention should be paid to the social context of various phenomena relevant in the world today. The volume traces the author's 5-year career, and offers a contextual, three-level approach for studying and theorizing about a variety of social psychological phenomena, combining cultural, situational, and personality levels of analysis. Each chapter illustrates concepts important to the field and provides insight into its advantages, applying these analyses to critical topics such as prejudice, far-right voting patterns, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact. The book describes milestones in establishing a theoretically and methodologically sound contextual approach, including major statistical advances that have made this research easier to conduct, more rigorous, and more commonplace. As the book demonstrates, in an educational capacity, contextual social psychology opens the possibility for joint undergraduate and graduate courses with other social science classes, such as sociology and political science. Pettigrew paints a broad picture of how social science truly operates at multiple levels.

Research and theory on intergroup contact have become one of the fastest advancing and most exciting fields in social psychology in recent years. The work is exciting because it combines basic social psychological concerns -- human interaction, situational influences on behavior -- with an effective means of improving intergroup relations at a time when the world is witnessing widespread intergroup hatred and strife. This volume provides an overview of this rapidly progressing area of investigation – its origins and early work, its current status and recent developments, along with criticisms of this work and suggestions for future directions. It covers a range of research findings involving contact between groups drawn from the authors’ extensive meta-analysis of 515 published studies on intergroup contact. This meta-analysis, together with the authors’ renowned research on intergroup contact, provides a solid foundation and broad overview of the field, to which have been added discussions of research extensions and emerging directions. When Groups Meet is a rich, comprehensive overview of classic and contemporary work on intergroup contact, and provides insights into where this work is headed in the future. For research specialists, this volume not only serves as a sourcebook for research and theory on intergroup contact, it also provides the entire 515-item bibliography from the meta-analysis. The clear structure and accessible writing style will also appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology and other social sciences.

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups. Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience. In Prejudice, the history and psychology of discriminatory policies is contrasted with efforts to overcome discrimination.