When class and race collapse: theoretically distinguishing between college students’ intersectional positions and their status groups

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a longitudinal interview-based study of racial-minority students of low-income or working-class origin at an elite private university in the United States, we examine how class and race co-determine students’ friendship-making patterns. We advance previous research in college students’ friendship-making by applying a dual lens of intersectionality theory and sociological group-making. Using this lens, we find that class and race collapse into each other, but in two distinct ways. Our main sample of multiply marginalized students occupy a class-racial intersectional position. By contrast, their class-race counterparts, who are envisioned and described as wealthy Whites, constitute not a class-racial intersectional position but a class-racial status group, leading to analytically distinct friendship-making dynamics between the two types of students. Our findings also entreat us to call for an analytical distinction between intersectional position and status group, leading to a dual lens that will serve future sociological research attentive to group-making processes and group-based conflict.