The APA review notes that racism involves beliefs and behaviors that can be explicit or implicit, and that people who endorse racist ideas may justify them through cognitive mechanisms such as rationalization and dehumanization. This supports the broader research theme that racist conduct is often accompanied by self-justifying beliefs rather than a belief that the conduct is wrong.

This article defines systemic racism as including "white racist attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power." It also distinguishes overt racism from deeper structures that can normalize or rationalize discriminatory behavior.

A meta-analysis of 57 racial attitude-discrimination studies found that emotional prejudices are more closely related to discrimination than beliefs and stereotypes. The authors write that people may recruit beliefs as a post-hoc justification for emotion-driven behavior.

The article notes that self-report measures of racism are limited because people may withhold their true beliefs in favor of socially desirable responses, and because humans have a desire to present a positive view of themselves even to themselves.

Moral disengagement is the cognitive process of decoupling one’s internal moral standards from one’s actions, thus allowing oneself to conduct unethical behavior without feelings of guilt or distress. In simpler terms, it is the psychological process of rationalizing bad decisions by convincing oneself that ethical standards do not apply within a particular context or situation.

The article discusses moral psychology and bias in the context of racism, arguing that racist judgments can be shaped by prejudices and false beliefs rather than by accurate perceptions of the world. It uses the language of distortion and morally significant bias in social cognition.

Moral disengagement theory has established itself as a widely applied paradigm to explain unethical behavior, providing an account of how people do harm and live with themselves (Bandura, 1999, 2016). Moral disengagement theory proposes that people are able to reconstrue moral cognitions through psychological processes to the effect that they reconstrue morality, reevaluating behaviors formerly judged to be immoral as amoral, morally permissible, or even morally obligatory; or to reconstrue agency in the behavior, thereby distancing themselves from being responsible for the behavior. This review also notes substantial variance in how the term “moral disengagement” is used in the literature, implying that disengagement is a situational, not universal, state and that people can alternate between disengaged and engaged moral views depending on context.

Research summarized here reports disagreement between White and Black participants about what counts as racism. It also says several social-cognitive factors contribute to this disagreement, including differences in lay intuitions about the attitudes and behaviors that count as racism.

The present study found that reflective information processing and broader value horizons may constitute a key resource for opposing ethnic moral disengagement. The article frames ethnic moral disengagement as a mechanism that allows individuals to engage in discriminatory and racist attitudes and actions, which is consistent with the idea that racist behavior can be cognitively justified rather than experienced as plainly wrong.

Moral disengagement is linked with various aggressive and anti-social behavior. Personal and societal factors can influence enlistment of moral disengagement. This meta-analytic review of youth moral disengagement reports that higher levels of moral disengagement are associated with more frequent bullying, aggression, and other harmful behaviors, but also finds substantial individual differences and contextual moderators, indicating that not all perpetrators fully disengage morally or share the same distorted world-view.

The study reports that people who witnessed racist behavior in person were less offended, and the authors suggest they may have rationalized the racist comment as acceptable. Jack Dovidio said, "We are good at rationalizing responses" and that people may go through a series of rationalizations such as, "Maybe it wasn't that bad."

The study investigates how white policy actors justify discriminatory education policy through moral disengagement. It argues that public support for racist education policies can reflect morally disengaging rhetoric and tacit acceptance of racist effects, rather than an explicit belief that the behavior is morally wrong.

The dissertation describes white ignorance as an active ignorance that results from a desire to maintain power and a sense of moral innocence. It says that many whites see their own moral goodness as an incontrovertible fact, making participation in systemic racism seem like a logical impossibility.

Moral disengagement is a process that enables people to engage in negative behaviors, from small misdeeds to great atrocities, without believing that they are causing harm or doing wrong. When Conrad Black, the fallen Canadian mogul convicted of multiple counts of fraud and obstruction of justice, claims that he "would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years," moral disengagement is what allows him to make that claim and believe it. Bandura’s framework describes eight mechanisms—such as moral justification, euphemistic labeling, and dehumanization—that people selectively activate; their use varies by person and situation, which suggests that moral disengagement is not uniformly present in all wrongdoers.

Shelby defines ideology as a widely held set of beliefs and implicit judgments that misrepresent significant social realities and function, through this distortion, to bring about or perpetuate unjust social relations. The excerpt explicitly links racist attitudes to truth-distorting ideology.

Users' racial identities also impact the experiences of racism online, at least according to the article’s discussion of racist content and moderation attitudes. This is relevant background on how racist attitudes can be linked to justifications used in online environments.

The article states that some White Christians used distorted readings of scripture to justify race-based separation as God's intended social order, and that these interpretations reinforced racial hierarchies and legitimized racial domination. It presents racism as sustained by moral and theological falsehoods.

The article argues that racist perceptions are distorted by racist attitudes, and states that such distortion is an epistemic element of racist perception because the perception is caused at least in part by the distorting influence of racist attitudes.

The concept of moral disengagement, introduced by Bandura (1999), has become a framework for understanding the psychological mechanisms that enable individuals to relinquish their moral standards and engage in unethical actions without feeling guilty. Analysis results indicate that a high level of moral disengagement increases the likelihood of unethical behavior, which can lead to negative consequences for organizations, including damage to reputation and a decline in stakeholder trust. However, the review also emphasizes that moral disengagement levels differ across individuals and contexts, suggesting that while some wrongdoers fully justify their actions as not wrong, others may continue to recognize their misconduct but act anyway.

The study hypothesized that participants would indicate that other people would be more likely than themselves to agree with racist arguments, suggesting a self-protective difference between judgments about one’s own racism and others’ racism.

The article discusses that self-report measures of racism are limited because individuals can present themselves in socially desirable ways, and because people have a motive to maintain a positive self-view.

Cohen defined a moral panic as a condition, episode, person, or group that becomes defined as a threat to societal values and interests. The text explains that moral panics involve exaggerated and distorted perceptions, which can be used to justify hostility toward stigmatized groups.