When is a black person perceived as white? It may all depend on social status, says a UO researcher. New evidence suggests that racial identity is far from fixed, and that we classify people based on much more than their skin tone.
Photo composite: Krysten Mayfair
According to a well-received study by UO sociologist Aliya Saperstein and UC Irvine’s Andrew Penner, categorizations like “white” and “black” rely on a number of factors, including assumptions we make about what people from each racial category do.
Their study reviewed race-related data from a long-term longitudinal survey — where they found surprising discrepancies in the racial categories assigned to certain individuals over time.
In that survey, interviewers phoned or met with subjects regularly beginning in 1979. A whopping 20 percent of the study’s 12,686 subjects had at least one incident in which they were perceived as one race one year and another race the next. The researchers were especially interested in what happened from year to year that might cause a person’s category to shift toward or away from the poles of “white” and “black.”
They found that subjects who were no longer perceived as white (but had been at one point) were more likely to have lost their jobs, been incarcerated or fallen into poverty. In other words, racial status changed once social status had become more aligned with a stereotype of blackness. It was also true, said Saperstein, that whites who were doing well were more likely to “stay” white and blacks who were not doing well were more likely to “stay” black.
“Our study suggests that part of how we determine who is white is based on our assumptions about what white people do or what black people do,” said Saperstein. “We are more likely to define successful people as white and unsuccessful people as black."
Even one’s own race is up for interpretation. Asked to identify their race once in 1979 and once in 2002, the subjects themselves, if they had suffered setbacks, were more likely to reclassify themselves away from white and towards black in 2002.
This suggests that racial stereotypes can become self-fulfilling prophesies, the sociologists concluded. Although black Americans are overrepresented among the poor, the unemployed and the incarcerated, people who find themselves in these life circumstances are also more likely to be seen as and identify as black and less likely to be seen as and identify as white.
Thus, not only does race shape social status, but social status shapes race.
— Chrisanne Beckner
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