Psychic explanations of racism are reductive and aren’t solved by the alt.

Last year, the American Psychological Association issued an apology for its role in “promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism” and resolved to do better (American Psychological Association, 2021). It acknowledged that addressing historical and contemporary harms due to racism will require redress at the individual, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels. Psychological research—with its focus on individuals— can speak to individual and interpersonal redress. But this focus can also provide a narrow lens. A casual reader of psychological research could come away with the impression that Confederate monuments reflect heritage, that guns promote felt safety, that health-care disparities in pain management are the result of physicians’ faulty perceptions, and that policy responses to pandemics are grounded in legitimate fears of contagion. They could also come away with the impression that debates over Confederate monuments, guns, health-care disparities, and pandemics are overblown and simply require individual-level change. Psychological research that is centered on history and its legacy, however, reveals important nuances: Confederate monuments are associated with hate, guns are tied to the maintenance of White supremacy, physicians’ perceptions follow from a long history of medical racism, and responses to pandemics are biased in ways that further the reach of long-held racist narratives. Such research can make people more mindful of individual- and system-level solutions.

Looking ahead, how can psychological research make history and its legacy more legible? The first step is relatively straightforward: Psychologists can provide historical and sociocultural context when presenting individual-level research. The next steps are decidedly harder: Psychologists will need to incorporate historical and sociocultural analysis into research questions, hypotheses, designs, analyses, and conclusions. These steps will require diverse multidisciplinary teams, which can make research harder and more time- and resource- intensive. They will require acknowledging and challenging racism in who is included in the research process and how the resulting work is reviewed and valued (e.g., Bharat et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2020). They will require reimagining the promotion and tenure process, which is currently driven by the number of publications in top-ranked journals. Multidisciplinary work is often more difficult to publish in disciplinary journals and is increasingly difficult to publish in top-ranked multidisciplinary journals (Callier, 2018). A related point is that social psychologists will need to value other methodologies (see Lewis, 2021). Although social psychologists can experimentally manipulate perceptions and knowledge of history (see Salter et al., 2018), incorporating historical context and measures may not always fit experimental paradigms.

Psychologists can do this. Psychological research can challenge racism by providing individual-level solutions— it already has—but in ways that do not ignore the history of racism or obscure the need for coordinated systemic change. One way it can do this is through deliberate and concerted efforts to incorporate historical context. This kind of research could then point to when and why individual change is not enough and systemic change is necessary; it could shed light on when and why people oppose systemic change and how to overcome such opposition; and ultimately, it could reveal the imprint of historical racism on cultures and individuals, and bring about meaningful social change—change that can reduce harm and empower racially marginalized groups. We think it is that kind of research that will bring psychologists to the policymakers’ table, as it should.