RACE AND STATUS….Blacks are often stereotyped as having lower status than whites. That won’t surprise anyone. But does it work in the other direction too?
Apparently so. The LA Times reports today on a study suggesting that people are more likely to be identified as black if their status changes for the worse. In a review of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in which subjects are interviewed annually (biannually after 1994), a pair of researchers found that people who had been identified by interviewers in one year as white were less likely to be identified as white the next year if they were in jail, unemployed, or impoverished:
“Race isn’t a characteristic that’s fixed at birth,” said UC Irvine sociologist Andrew Penner, one of the study’s authors. “We’re perceived a certain way and identify a certain way depending on widely held stereotypes about how people believe we should behave.”
….For example, 10% of people previously described as white were reclassified as belonging to another race if they became incarcerated. But if they stayed out of jail, 4% were reclassified as something other than white, the study said.
I don’t have any special views on the “race is a social construct” question, but this certainly suggests, at the margins at least, that social status does indeed have an effect on how race is perceived. The full study is here.