Aliya Saperstein, University of OregonThe Consequences of Racial Fluidity for Inequality in the United StatesTime: 12:30 pm on 10.9.2009 Debates about how to think about race are long-standing and controversial, both inside and outside the American academy. We offer a new perspective on racial inequality by revisiting a foundational assumption in the field of stratification: What if one’s race is not necessarily fixed? Using nearly two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, we demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position – and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. This provides evidence that race is not socially constructed solely by macro-level shifts in laws or official classification systems; it is also constantly reconstructed in everyday interactions between individuals. Further, we find that the pattern of these micro-level changes reinforces existing racial disparities in the contemporary United States by redefining successful or high status people as white and unsuccessful or low status people as black. |
