Humanizing racialization: Social psychology in a time of unexpected transformational conjunctions.

ABSTRACT

The unexpected transformations produced by the conjunction of COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter highlight the importance of social psychological understandings and the need for a step change in theorization of the social. This paper focuses on racialization. It considers issues that social psychology needs to address in order to reduce inequalities and promote social justice. It draws on theoretical resources of intersectionality and hauntology to illuminate the ways in which social psychological research frequently makes black people visible in ways that exclude them from normative constructions. The final main part of the paper presents an analysis of an interview with the racing driver Lewis Hamilton to illustrate possible ways of humanizing racialization by giving recognition to the multiplicity and historical location of racialized positioning. The paper argues that, while social psychology has made vital contributions to the understanding of group processes and of racisms, there remains a need to humanize racialization by conducting holistic analyses of black people's (and others') intersectional identities.