Does Environmental Psychology Afford an “Effective Context” for the Study of Structural Racism?

Recent manifestations of racial violence have renewed conversations about racism in society. An important question for psychologists, who tend to study of racism as a problem of “tainted hearts and minds,” concerns how they might contribute to scholarship that illuminates and confronts structural racism. In this paper, we consider whether environmental psychology (EP)—a discipline unique in its attention to the everyday environment of psychological experience—can serve as a site for such scholarship. We critically review all articles that mention racism in EP’s two leading journals. We find that of the roughly 4,700 articles published in the two journals, racism appears in 45 articles, 10 of which effectively apply EP’s framework to illuminate and confront structural racism. We conclude by arguing for EP to shift toward a racism-conscious lens, until which an EP for the study of structural racism will remain unborn.