Race as an Open Field: Exploring Identity beyond Fixed Choices

Abstract

Recent work on shifting racial classifications and the fluidity of racial identities in the United States has questioned the subjective and cultural adequacy of dominant racial and ethnic classifications. The cultural legitimacy of biracial, hybrid, and contextual racial identifications appears to be increasing, and the U.S. census now allows Americans to choose multiple races (Brunsma and Rockquemore 2002; Liebler et al. 2017; Rockquemore and Brunsma 2008). According to Brunsma and Rockquemore (2002:112-13), such changes cast "serious doubt on the validity of races as social identities. .. [since] individuals may no longer view themselves in mutually exclusive ways and, at a deeper level, ... others may not view them as members of distinct racial groups." Are traditional racial categories breaking down? This paper examines how Americans racially identify themselves when they are not constrained by traditional fixed-choice categories. We use data from a nationally representative survey panel that included two sets of racial and ethnic identifiers collected at different times: a standard fixed-choice race question that respondents answered when they entered the panel and another asked at the time of 748425S REXXX10.

Cumulative disadvantage? The role of race compared to ethnicity, religion, and non-white phenotype in explaining hiring discrimination in the U.S. labour market

“…It is not elaborated why Asian, Thai, or Pakistani are classified as a race, while Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin is classified as an ethnicity. This instability and incoherence of race as a concept has also been pointed out by other scholars (Croll and Gerteis 2019;Omi and Winant 2001).…”

Minority Stress and Loneliness in a Global Sample of Sexual Minority Adults: The Roles of Social Anxiety, Social Inhibition, and Community Involvement

“…White, the largest portion of the sample, was the reference. Following recommendations by Allen et al ( 2011 ), we included Latino/Latina/Hispanic in the racial categories because some Latinx/Hispanic individuals, particularly in the USA, consider their ethnicity to be a race and express difficulty with separate race and ethnicity questions (Croll & Gerteis, 2019 ). Those who selected Other and wrote that they were White, Caucasian, European, or an ethnicity commonly considered White or “Other White” in a given country (e.g., Irish/Celtic, Ukrainian, Mediterranean, Australian, New Zealand European/Pakeha) were re-categorized into the White reference category (2%).…”

Assessing and Extending Colorblind Racism Theory Using National Survey Data

“…and (2) How might awareness of structural disadvantage mediate the relationship between colorblind racism and support for race-conscious public policies? We attempt to answer these questions using the BAM survey 1 , a nationally representative online probability-based survey contracted through GfK with funding from the National Science Foundation (Couper 2017) that has been used in numerous publications on religion, race, and American civil society (Croll and Gerteis 2019; Edgell, Frost, and Stewart 2017; Edgell et al 2016; Frost and Edgell 2017, 2018; Hartmann et al 2017; Manning et al 2015; Stewart 2016; Stewart, Edgell, and Delehanty 2018). Essential for this particular analysis is that the survey contains a number of both conventional and innovative items designed to capture different dimensions of racial prejudice, animus, and belief.…”