Abstract:
This article argues that a more interdisciplinary approach to researching racism can help clarify
the relationship between discrimination and prejudice. Prejudice consists of people’s ideas
about humanity’s division into races, the assumed typical characteristics of different racial
groups, and the negative attitudes and emotions these ideas lead people to. Discrimination
consists of individual actions, common practices, and policies that produce racial inequity.
Despite scholarship on racism laying bare many of the ways that these two phenomena interact,
the intricacies of this complex dynamic would benefit from more academic attention. Increased
interdisciplinary research on racism can help bring insights from disciplines that generally
focus on either prejudice or discrimination together which can help us better understand the
interplay between these two.
