White’s Perceptions of Biracial Individuals’ Race Shift When Biracials Speak Out Against Bias

Abstract

Previous research suggests that a person’s racial identity shapes the way others respond when that person speaks out against racial prejudice. In the present research, we consider instead how speaking out against racial prejudice shapes people’s impressions of a confronter’s racial identity, such as experiences with discrimination, stereotype enactment, and even phenotype. Two experiments found that White perceivers evaluated a Black/White biracial person who spoke out against (vs. remained silent to) racial prejudice as more stigmatized and Black identified and as having more stereotypically Black (vs. White) preferences and Black (vs. White) ancestry when they confronted. The faces of biracial confronters (vs. nonconfronters) were also recalled as more phenotypically Black (vs. White; S2). This evidence suggests that speaking out against bias colors Whites’ impressions of a biracial target across both subjective and objective measures of racial identity. Implications for interracial interactions and interpersonal perception are discussed.