Abstract
Racism is a pervasive social justice issue that has been addressed by a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and sociology. Behavior-analytic accounts of racism have primarily focused on individual and interpersonal acts of prejudice or bias and have used operant contingencies of reinforcement as a unit of analysis for conceptualizing the development of racism. However, the absence of behavior-analytic theories of systemic racism, which includes cultural practices that are discriminatory in nature, is apparent. In the present discussion, we provide a preliminary analysis of systemic racism through the lens of cultural selection and metacontingencies as units of analysis. We provide a learning-theory perspective on systems of racism, offer solutions to systemic racism based on metacontingencies as a conceptual tool, and describe barriers to those solutions by evaluating correlations between metacontingencies and individual operant contingencies.
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Notes
In the present discussion, the terms majority and minority are used based on census definitions, which indicates that majority refers to individuals who are European or White and that minority refers to individuals who primarily represent the following groups: Arab, Black, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Latin American, South Asian, Southeast Asian, West Asian, and biracial.
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The authors would like to thank Rebecca Duncan for her helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.
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Saini, V., Vance, H. Systemic Racism and Cultural Selection: A Preliminary Analysis of Metacontingencies. Behav. Soc. Iss. 29, 52–63 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42822-020-00040-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42822-020-00040-0