The stronger your in-group identity, such as black, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. Strongly identifying blacks are bound to have ambivalence about the United States of America and any white-majority or non-black majority country. It’s basic social development theory.
In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. For example, England is the best country in the world! We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against the out group (the group we don’t belong to). For example, the Americans, French etc. are a bunch of losers!
Therefore, we divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).
This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). Social identity theory states that the in-group will discriminate against the out-group to enhance their self-image.
The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.
Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its extreme forms, racism may result in genocide, such as occurred in Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians and Serbs.
Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:
1. the differences between groups
2. the similarities of things in the same group.
We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we belong (the in-group) as being different from the others (the out-group), and members of the same group as being more similar than they are. Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e. “them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.
The succession of high-profile killings of black men by the police in recent years — in Ferguson, Mo.; North Charleston, S.C.; Baltimore; New York City; and most recently in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights — has touched off protests across the nation and given growing prominence to a movement, Black Lives Matter, dedicated to addressing inequities and discrimination in the criminal justice system.
The movement’s often boisterous denunciations of police violence have prompted a backlash from police unions, politicians and some rank-and-file officers, who accuse it of sowing hatred against men and women in uniform. Some have even blamed the movement for inspiring the gunmen in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
It is the same sentiment that slowed the movement’s campaign in New York City after two police officers were killed in an ambush in December 2014 by a mentally ill black man. The man, who killed himself shortly after killing the officers, had cited on social media the deaths of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by the police in July 2014, and Michael Brown, the man killed in Ferguson in August 2014.
Black police officers said that when the topic was race and policing, they often sidestepped talking in public, and even talking with their co-workers.
In downtown Cleveland, where Republican convention-goers frequently cheered officers patrolling in groups on Monday, an eight-year veteran of the city’s transit police said the strain around race and policing had become so great, he had taken to completely avoiding the subject at work.
