Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1999 by Lawrence D. Bobo

Lawrence D. Bobo [*]

This research integrates and elaborates the basic premises of Blumer's group position theory of prejudice. It does so in order to make explicit, more fully integrated, and empirically pliable the theoretical foundations of a sociological analysis of the nature of racial prejudice. In so doing, the research identfies important areas of agreement between Gordon Allport's approach to prejudice and that of Blumer. Blumer neither provided a full synthetic statement of his several major pieces on prejudice nor pursued sustained empirical research in the area. Hence, the present article (1) identifies the core assumptions of the group position model, (2) summarizes a recent line of empirical work examining claims embedded in the group position approach, (3) specifies how this approach differs from other closely related approaches, and (4) identifies major tasks for future theoretical and empirical work.

The practice of racism is not an abstraction; it produces patterns of behavior which involve real people in highly stressful conflicts of interests and expectation.

Lincoln, 1996 (pp. 8-9)

The need for penetrating theoretical models of prejudice is no less acute today than it was when Gordon Allport published his seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice, in 1954. In the United States, and countless other parts of the world, significant cleavages develop between groups defined by racial or ethnic markers. Within the United States, we currently face a potentially historic turn against many of the civil rights accomplishments of the past four decades: a great chasm of misunderstanding still separates Black and White Americans, and a rising tide of anti-immigrant fervor is gathering force. There are, in short, many reasons for social psychologists to remain committed to unraveling the nature of prejudice. As social scientists posing basic questions of social dynamics with respect to race there is much that we do not yet understand.

Over the past two decades we have seen efforts to refine and extend Adorno and colleagues' authoritarian personality theory (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Altemeyer, 1988; Duckitt, 1989). Important work has reconceptualized the classic D. Katz and Braly (1933) approach to measuring and understanding racial stereotypes (Devine & Elliot, 1995). A wide array of studies have sought to modernize and make politically relevant Allport's sociocultural model of prejudice (see I. Katz, 1991; Pettigrew, 1982) in the form of theories of modern or symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981; Sears, 1988) or a distinction between blatant and subtle racism (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). Myrdal's (1944) concern with value contradictions figures prominently in a more recent line of work on ambivalence (Katz, Wackenhut, & Hass, 1986). And above all else, there has been a wide-ranging effort to grapple with social identity processes as a fundamental aspect of intergroup relations (Tajfel, 1981, 1982; J. C. Turn er, 1987).

Most of this work has emerged from one of the "three faces" of social psychology as defined by House: that involving the dominant face, or social psychology as practiced by those trained mainly in psychology (cf. House, 1977). It is fair to say that this approach retains its traditional emphasis on the psychological functioning of the individual in response to immediate social stimuli though this framework is of necessity broadened to a degree for those working in political psychology (Sears, 1987). My purpose is to elaborate the foundations of a theory of prejudice more squarely identified with a sociological tradition. Specifically, I extend, refine and report on partial tests of Herbert Blumer's group position theory of prejudice. This is a valuable exercise for two reasons.

First, there is something to be gained from viewing prejudice through a more sociological lens. In this approach, the express mission is to theorize how social structure comes to shape individual psychology and socially consequential behavior. It is neither a sociological approach interested only in the macro-level, structural dynamics of race (Blauner, 1972; Wilson, 1978) nor one that defines individual psychological dynamics as relatively unimportant (Bonacich, 1991). Although grounded in a sociological tradition, the group position approach to prejudice falls squarely within the domain of social psychology as defined by Dorwin Cartwright: it is concerned with "how society influences the cognition, motivation, development, and behavior of individuals and, in turn, is influenced by them" (Cartwright, 1979, p.91). Although not in complete agreement, in this respect at least the approaches of Allport and of Blumer share an important commonality (a point elaborated upon below).

Second, the group position framework may provide a viable synthesis of models of racial prejudice that all too often have been treated as antagonistic, if not mutually exclusive, in much of the previous research literature. I hope to show that it can save us from the all too often false oppositions of interests versus ideology, of rationality versus irrationality, of microsocial versus macrosocial approaches.