A Critical Introduction to Psychology

Seeing Race 89

racially biased perceptual judgments (Wilson, Hugenberg, & Rule, 2017),
and (2) a chapter on perception from an orthodox introduction to
psychology textbook (Griggs, 2017). Both examples are given for the
purposes of evaluating the potential for a CRP within the orthodox practice
and instruction of perception—the first is directed at methodological
application, and the second at how perception is introduced to future
psychologists.
In academic discourses of the Global North, racism begins with the
perceptual recognition of a person’s racial identity. This means that the
psychology of perception plays an important role in the construction of
what it means to see the race of an Other. Orthodox psychology of
perception becomes the authority of whether or not one can even see a
person’s race, as well as how this might influence judgments about one’s
environment. In these ways, psychology promotes an awareness of what
Adams et al. (2011) call “Identity Consciousness”. In order to do this in a
sufficiently critical manner, psychology must recognize the role that
“identity and subjectivity have in both (a) construction of everyday
realities and (b) academic production of knowledge about those everyday
realities” (p. 1362).

MAINSTREAM PSYCHOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

IS EURO-CENTRIC

Euro- and North American-centric trends in the history of metaphysics
have resulted in the orthodox psychology of perception. Sensation has been
understood as the point of contact between body and world, and perception
has been understood as the meaningful organization of sensations in the
person’s mind. The world interacts with the body, the body interacts with
the mind.