About me

My name is Sakaria Laisene Auelua-Toomey, and I am a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.  Broadly, I study racism as a system of advantage based on race that is maintained and reinforced by an interplay between psychological processes and our social contexts. In my research, I use a range of methods (e.g., surveys, field experiments, archival analyses, natural language processing) and include diverse perspectives to examine how our social contexts come to shape people's expressions of and reactions to racism in a variety of domains.