Race as Lived Experience

Abstract

A growing body of social science research has sought to conceptualize race as a multidimensional concept in which context, societal relations, and institutional dynamics are key components. Utilizing a specially designed survey, we develop and use multiple measures of race (skin color, ascribed race, and discrimination experiences) to capture race as “lived experience” and assess their impact on Latinos’ self-rated health status. We model these measures of race as a lived experience to test the explanatory power of race, both independently and as an integrated scale with categorical regression, scaling, and dimensional analyses. Our analyses show that our multiple measures of race have significant and negative effects on Latinos’ self-reported health. Skin color is a dominant factor that impacts self-reported health both directly and indirectly. We then advocate for the utilization of multiple measures of race, adding to those used in our analysis, and their application to other health and social outcomes. Our analysis provides important contributions across a wide range of health, illness, social, and political outcomes for communities of color.

COVID-19 Is Having a Devastating Impact on the Economic Well-being of Latino Families

“…We also find that skin color has a statistically significant effect on economic stress as measured in our scale of economic hardships faced during COVID-19. There is an existing literature across the social sciences that has found skin color among Latinos to have an effect on several outcomes, including racial-identification (Golash-Boza and Darity Jr 2008 ; Darity Jr. et al 2005 ), and health outcomes (Garcia et al 2015 ). Most directly tied to this study, scholars have found that darker-skinned have some worse economic outcomes than their lighter-toned counterparts (Rosenblum et al 2016 ; Davila et al 2011 ).…”

What’s Your “Street Race”? Leveraging Multidimensional Measures of Race and Intersectionality for Examining Physical and Mental Health Status among Latinxs

“…Zambrana and Dill (2006) suggest that compliance-oriented data collection in health research mechanistically aggregates all Hispanics into the same category, possibly masking important within group differences by race, ethnicity, gender, class, nativity, sexual orientation, legal status, and language proficiency. Second, Zambrana and Dill (2006) allude to the complexities of historic White supremacist colonization and the on-going dynamics of internalized racism that may complicate data collection (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Gómez 2007; Dowling 2014; Foley 2016; Cobas et al 2009; Garcia et al 2015). …”

Beyond Race/Ethnicity: Skin Color and Cardiometabolic Health Among Blacks and Hispanics in the United States

“…How researchers conceptualize and measure race/ethnicity has implications for how we understand and address racial/ethnic inequalities in health. 15 In particular, wide skin color variation exists within these populations. 16,17 Despite the frequent treatment of Blacks and Hispanics as homogenous racial/ethnic groups, scholars have found that how Blacks and Hispanics are perceived by others affects their SES, exposure to racial discrimination, and health.…”

“…23,24 Although less is known about the association between skin color and cardiometabolic health among US Hispanics, darker skin color is associated with poorer self-rated health among Hispanics in the United States and four Latin American countries. 15,25 …”