Between prejudice and discrimination: Interdisciplinarity as a way to better understand racism’s prejudice-discrimination dynamic

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.