Racial Membership Research Articles

Making Sense of Racial Membership

AbstractWhich individuals belong to a racial group, and what determines membership? I argue that questions about membership are importantly different from questions regarding the ontology of racial categories and invite a distinctive line of inquiry. But there's a formidable challenge to providing determinate and consistent answers to membership questions: Many phenomena documented in sociology and psychology generate reasonable and systematic disagreement about membership that cannot be adjudicated by an influential variety of social constructionism. While the puzzle of racial identity remains, we emerge with a new appreciation for how racial membership is a distinctive part of it.

Multiracial identity and social support: Navigating the monoracial paradigm of race

Following a racialized encounter, especially one that is racist or discriminatory, individuals often turn to those in their racial ingroup for social support. However, ingroup racial membership lines may be blurred for those with one Black parent and one White parent. The purpose of this study is to examine Black-White multiracial individuals’ experiences navigating the monoracial paradigm of race when seeking racialized support. Guided by Critical Multiracial Theory, I take a self-reflexive Interpretative Phenomenology Approach to explore the racialized support-seeking experiences of 15 Black-White biracial adults in the U.S. Results reveal a unique support seeking process that is influenced by the monoracial paradigm of race. Implications and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Monoracials' perceptions of biracials in Singapore.

Drawing on social identity theory, present research examined the effects of overlapping racial membership on monoracials' categorization of biracials as in-/out-group members, as well as its impact on monoracials' social perceptions of biracials in Singapore. Within Singapore, it is hypothesized that biracials who share racial membership with monoracials would be rated more as monoracials' racial in-group and be evaluated more positively. Furthermore, monoracials' positive perceptions of biracials with (vs. without) shared racial membership would be less influenced by biracials' confrontation of racial prejudice. Studies 1 (N = 242) and 2 (N = 153) sampled Chinese Singaporeans to assess their perceptions of several fictitious biracial targets. Utilizing an experimental confrontation paradigm, Studies 3 (N = 170) and 4 (N = 225) investigated the effects of confronting racial prejudice on Chinese Singaporeans' perceptions of biracials. Studies 1 and 2 revealed that Chinese Singaporeans perceive Chinese-other (vs. non-Chinese) biracials as more racially similar to themselves and were more likely to report positive social perceptions of Chinese-other biracials. Compared to non-Chinese biracials, Studies 3 and 4 found that Chinese-other biracials' response to racial prejudice did not negatively affect Chinese Singaporeans' perception of them. Findings revealed that Chinese-other biracials were well-liked regardless of their response to racial prejudice, demonstrating Chinese Singaporeans' recognition of shared racial membership. Interestingly, Chinese Singaporeans increased their liking for Indian-Malay biracials when they confronted antimajority racial prejudice. Perceiving shared racial membership positively influenced Chinese Singaporeans' perceptions and feelings toward biracials. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

“If I can help somebody”: The civic-oriented thought and practices of Black male teacher-coaches

ABSTRACT Fostering a sense of civic engagement is considered an essential purpose of social studies education. However, given the ways in which formal civic curricula and standards decenter the impact of racial membership on civic status, Black teachers are turning to alternative, out-of-school sites to enact critical approaches to teaching civics. Interscholastic athletics serves as one locale for such revisionist practices. This multiple case study troubles the centrality of Whiteness and deficit notions within the teacher-coach discourse by explicating the civic practices of five Black male teacher-coaches who served in schools that were not predominantly Black. Drawing on a conceptual framework rooted in Black critical theories, their civic mindedness of coaching ideologies and civic-oriented activities fostered a sense of liberatory fantasy while immersed within an anti-Black milieu.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

Democratic representation and charter school governance: The case of KIPP

The growth of school choice options such as charter schools is often understood as a way to meet the needs of under-represented communities, but concerns have been raised as to the diversity of those promoting and leading such options, as well as for the voices of those whose schooling is being reformed. Garrett Wilson and Christopher Lubienski examined governing boards in one of the most popular chains of charter schools, finding that public school boards are often smaller and more diverse with broader racial and female membership. They explore reasons for these patterns and discuss implications for democratic governance of public education.

Racial Identity, Group Consciousness, and Attitudes: A Framework for Assessing Multiracial Self‐Classification

AbstractMultiracial self‐classifiers are the fastest‐growing racial population in the United States. While their rise signals a departure from norms of hypodescent, little is known about the sociopolitical meanings attached to multiracial labels. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding multiracials’ sense of racial group identity, linked fate, and racial attitudes. Examining a national opinion survey that samples more than 1200 multiracial adults, we compare the identity and attitudinal profiles of the two largest multiracial groups in the United States—White‐Asians and White‐Blacks—with those of their component monoracial groups. We find that while White‐Asians and White‐Blacks often distinguish themselves from their component races, on balance, the assertion of dual racial membership signals greater solidarity and/or affect toward the minority race. These findings suggest that members of these multiracial populations are likely to align themselves relatively more with their minority background than with Whites on political issues that are racial in nature.

Unemployment in Socially Disadvantaged Communities in Tennessee, US, During the COVID-19

Urban studies related to previous pandemics and impacts on cities focused on vulnerable categories including poor and marginalized groups. We continue this tradition and analyze unemployment outcomes in a context of a multi-dimensional social disadvantage that is unfolding during the ongoing public health crisis. For this, we first propose an approach to identify communities by social disadvantage status captured by several key metrics. Second, we apply this methodology in the study of the effect of social disadvantage on unemployment during the COVID-19 and measure the COVID-19-related economic impact using the most recent data on unemployment. The study focuses upon vulnerable communities in in the southeastern US (Tennessee) with a concentration of high social vulnerability and rural communities. While all communities initially experienced the impact that was both sudden and severe, communities that had lower social disadvantage pre-COVID were much more likely to start resuming economic activities earlier than communities that were already vulnerable pre-COVID due to high social disadvantage with further implications upon community well-being. The impact of social disadvantage grew stronger post-COVID compared with the pre-pandemic period. In addition, we investigate worker characteristics associated with adverse labor market outcomes during the later stage of the current economic recession. We show that some socio-demographic groups have a systematically higher likelihood of being unemployed. Compared with the earlier stages, racial membership, poverty and loss of employment go hand in hand, while ethnic membership (Hispanics) and younger male workers are not associated with higher unemployment. Overall, the study contributes to a growing contemporaneous research on the consequences of the COVID-19 recession. Motivated by the lack of the research on the spatial aspect of the COVID-19-caused economic recession and its economic impacts upon the vulnerable communities during the later stages, we further contribute to the research gap.

Navigating Sexual Racism in the Sexual Field: Compensation for and Disavowal of Marginality by Racial Minority Grindr Users in Singapore

Abstract This study investigates racialized sexual desires of Grindr users in Singapore, a multiracial East Asian society. We found that users are continually pigeonholed into racial categories tethered to stereotypes, hierarchizing users such that the Chinese majority are considered more desirable. Users employ race labels to communicate racial membership, circumnavigating Grindr’s preset ethnic categories. Users also creatively appropriate interface affordances to enforce racialized preferences; this includes a preoccupation with verifying racial identities, especially through photos. Racial minorities strategically respond to sexual racism by negotiating for Chinese majority membership, emphasizing the cosmopolitan self over the ethnic self, and/or reframing the situation to disavow victimhood. This research counterbalances the ethnocentric focus of existing sexual racism literature on white-centric contexts by applying sexual fields theory to multiracial East Asia, yielding meaningful theoretical contributions. We also foreground the importance of considering internal dispositions of feelings and attitudes as situated resistance against sexual racism on Grindr.Lay summaryThis article explores how sexual desires of Singaporean users on Grindr (a gay dating app) are socially conditioned to include racial preferences, which in turn constitutes sexual racism. This research is important as it examines the complexities of sexual racism within a multiracial and postcolonial East Asian context, balancing the existing scholarly focus on sexual racism in Western societies. Our interviews with Grindr users in Singapore revealed that users tend to slot themselves (and others) into racial categories that appear fixed and linked to racial stereotypes. This allows a pecking order to emerge, such that the racial majority (Singaporean Chinese users) are generally seen as most desirable. Race is therefore one important dimension of the interactions on Grindr. If racial identity is not immediately obvious on app profiles, users often seek to find out the racial identities of other potential partners by, for example, requesting photos to make guesses about their race. We also studied the responses of racial minorities to sexual racism. These strategies include trying to present a Chinese or Chinese-mixed racial identity, emphasizing an identity that is globalized rather than ethnic, and reframing their situation to disavow their victimhood.

Ancestry, Color, or Culture? How Whites Racially Classify Others in the U.S.

Historically, the U.S. legal system formally institutionalized ancestry and appearance as the foundations of racial membership. Yet evidence suggests informal classification logics based on cultura...

Contraceptive selection and practice: Associations with self-identified race and socioeconomic disadvantage.

Many researchers and policymakers have linked contraceptive programs to improvements in women's and children's socioeconomic outcomes. However, these studies have overlooked how socioeconomic status may be an initial driver of contraceptive choice and behavior. Here, I examine the relationship between a comprehensive measure of socioeconomic disadvantage, self-identified race, and contraceptive method selection at enrollment in a unique longitudinal study of contraceptive clients who received a new type of method at no cost. I then examine whether socioeconomic disadvantage has an association with contraceptive switching or discontinuation. I demonstrate that socioeconomic disadvantage decreases the chance of selecting any IUD, while Black racial membership increases the chance of selecting the 3-month injectable and Multiracial membership increases the chance of selecting the Vaginal Ring. I then demonstrate that socioeconomic disadvantage and self-identified race have intersectional and variable associations with switching, and, to a lesser extent, discontinuing methods. These findings offer an important insight for implementation in contraceptive programs: eliminating financial barriers to access contraceptive services does not eliminate the socioeconomic contexts that influence method selection and use that occur as part of everyday lived experiences. Taken cumulatively, these results suggest that contraceptive services should be offered to women in ways that ensure access to reproductive justice without obscuring the need for social changes in the institutions that create disadvantage and shape contraceptive use itself.

"Objects Insignificant to Sight": Racial Violence and Empathy in Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black"

"Objects Insignificant to Sight":Racial Violence and Empathy in Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black" John Lutz (bio) Way Down South in Dixie(Break the heart of me)Love is a naked shadowOn a gnarled and naked tree. Langston Hughes, "Song for a Dark Girl" Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist An effort to lay bare the root causes of the empathy deficiency that enables the brutal practice of lynching lies at the very center of William Faulkner's short masterpiece "Pantaloon in Black." First published in 1940 as a chapter in the novel Go Down, Moses, "Pantaloon in Black" confronts the underlying psychological and social forces that legitimize lynching by humanizing its central African American character, Rider. Recent discoveries in neuroscience and social psychology concerning empathy can provide a useful vantage point for understanding Faulkner's critique of racist violence in "Pantaloon in Black" and in Go Down, Moses more generally. The preponderance of evidence from these fields demonstrates that our emotional responses to the pain of others are hardwired into our brains and frequently felt with an involuntary immediacy over which we have little control. Feeling with others is a spontaneous, natural feature of our common humanity, a biological inheritance most likely developed as an adaptive trait in the process of human evolution. However, if our empathic responses to others are indeed a common biological inheritance, then how do we explain the apparent suspension of such responses in the inflicting of racist violence? In his research into empathic accuracy, William Ickes notes how negative frames of reference that "become inflexible, unyielding, and irreconcilable" [End Page 189] can create "an empathic stalemate or, even worse, the death of any mutual understanding" (Ickes 223). This discovery suggests that any internal obstacle to feeling with others might also inhibit our intellectual capacity to understand their lived experience or perspective. Ickes's research bears out the significant role that biases about designated out-groups play in our ability to make accurate inferences about what others think and feel. Citing similar research, Elizabeth A. Segal et al. have investigated how notions of otherness appear to be at the foundation of most barriers to empathy. If we consider a person fully human and on a footing of equality with ourselves, we can more readily consider his or her inner life and thoughts and successfully empathize. But "if we do not view them as fully human, the empathic process will likely be bypassed. Neurological data supports these points" (Segal et al. 89). Essentially, the more that a given set of ideological assumptions transforms others into inhuman objects, the less mirroring of the self and adopting the perspective of these others becomes likely or possible. This tendency of negative frames of reference to block empathy is particularly common in biased perceptions directed at entire groups. As Segal et al. note, "Framing entire groups as others to be feared is a step in the dehumanizing process and obstructs any possibility of empathic insight" (91). In addition, people tend to attribute more complex mental states to targets they like and ascribe complex emotions more readily to members of their in-group than an out-group (Echols and Correll 60).1 In an interesting study measuring emotional reactions to the pain of others, Avenanti et al. used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to determine whether racial membership or bias modulates the response to the pain of those in other racial groups. Their findings point to a lack of empathic brain response to outgroup members and provide support for the "notion that race-related prejudices can shape social categorization and lead to dehumanized perception of different others" (Avenanti et al. 1021). If racist ideas that dehumanize other individuals or groups block empathy and short-circuit even basic neurological mirroring responses, one would expect to see pronounced empathy deficits in instances of racially-motivated violence. The discoveries of neuroscience and social psychology concerning empathy illuminate and complement Faulkner's antiracist stance in "Pantaloon in Black" in two important respects. First, the existence of empathy as an inherited aspect of our common biological nature undercuts one of the central planks of racist...

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR NON-RACIALISTS

Abstract Is affirmative action aimed at racial justice compatible with non-racialism? Insofar as affirmative action interventions go beyond measures aimed at de-biasing selection procedures, they are typically framed in a way that assumes that candidates belong to racial groups, and that candidates’ racial identities can and should be revealed to selection committees. The non-racialist denies the latter, and so is likely to reject affirmative action. Yet race membership is a misleading way to frame affirmative action. Insofar as preferential treatment is justified, it is because affirmative action aims to correct harms and wrongs due to racism, rather than to promote individuals on the basis of their race. So there is moral reason to advantage candidates for positions insofar as they are victims of racism. I propose such a race-agnostic reformulation of affirmative action: vulnerability-based affirmative action. Vulnerability-based affirmative action goes beyond ensuring equality of opportunity (it is robust), and it does not implicitly endorse racial identities (it is non-racial). Vulnerability-based affirmative action has some advantages over comparable race-based measures: it allows for more context-sensitive judgments about compensation, and it puts us to the task of identifying patterns of racism and their effects.

Kaleidoscope: contested identities and new forms of race membership

ABSTRACTWhat Brubaker [2016. “The Dolezal Affair: Race, Gender, and the Micropolitics of Identity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (3): 414–448] referred to in these pages as “the Dolezal affair”, though widely and intensely scrutinized, was only one example of a broader series of recent public controversies over an individual's “true” racial identity. This article argues that in the early-twenty-first century, claims of race-group membership are being complicated by technological developments in genetics and in cosmetics, as well as by new respect for subjective self-identification. As a result, there are more paths than ever to claiming and demonstrating racial belonging. In particular, I suggest that four new types of race-group member are emerging: genetic, cosmetic, emotive, and constructed. Should these types come to be widely accepted as genuine race members, racial groups will become more heterogeneous, resembling kaleidoscopic arrays of core and peripheral members who differ in terms of how many qualifications for belonging they may legitimately claim.

Migration and African diaspora mission and the changing Christian landscape of the West

This Essay reflects on the significance of African and African-led Pentecostal/charismatic churches in the modem West. The basic thesis is that through the establishment of African churches (that is churches made of Africans) and by African Christians forming churches in Europe ( that is churches formed by Africans but that have a predominantly white or mixed race membership), a case has been made for the reference to Christianity as a non-Western religion with Africa as one of its major hubs. Kwame Bediako argued that Christianity has now become a non-Western religion with its centers of dominance in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Bediako 1995).

Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable

This article investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio-/video-recorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing “hearably racist” talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associations between membership categories and category-bound activities. Orienting to implicit inferential material as the source of trouble licenses participant account-seeking; treating the racism as a repairable downgrades its status as an overt instance of racism.

Prejudiced interactions: implicit racial bias reduces predictive simulation during joint action with an out-group avatar.

During social interactions people automatically apply stereotypes in order to rapidly categorize others. Racial differences are among the most powerful cues that drive these categorizations and modulate our emotional and cognitive reactivity to others. We investigated whether implicit racial bias may also shape hand kinematics during the execution of realistic joint actions with virtual in- and out-group partners. Caucasian participants were required to perform synchronous imitative or complementary reach-to-grasp movements with avatars that had different skin color (white and black) but showed identical action kinematics. Results demonstrate that stronger visuo-motor interference (indexed here as hand kinematics differences between complementary and imitative actions) emerged: i) when participants were required to predict the partner's action goal in order to on-line adapt their own movements accordingly; ii) during interactions with the in-group partner, indicating the partner's racial membership modulates interactive behaviors. Importantly, the in-group/out-group effect positively correlated with the implicit racial bias of each participant. Thus visuo-motor interference during joint action, likely reflecting predictive embodied simulation of the partner's movements, is affected by cultural inter-individual differences.

Black Nerds, Asian Activists, and Caucasian Dogs

This study focuses on modern representations of race on the Internet. As race continues to be used as a meaningful category for understanding the social world, Internet-based displays of racial membership reflect the ongoing significance of race. Concurrent with Facebook's growth in popularity has been the development in ways that racial identity has been expressed online. While Facebook has been the site of study for individual behavior, Facebook Group behavior is still understudied. The author applies the communication theory of identity and self-categorization theory to digital expressions of race as examples of cultural markers of identification. Thematic analysis is used to examine intra-racial and cross-racial variances across cultural groups that are self-identified as White/Caucasian, Black/African-American, and Asian/Asian-American. The results indicate that users of colors create online representations of race that are different and counter to those found in mass media.

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

Searching for emotion or race: Task-irrelevant facial cues have asymmetrical effects

Facial cues of threat such as anger and other race membership are detected preferentially in visual search tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these facial cues interact in visual search. If both cues equally facilitate search, a symmetrical interaction would be predicted; anger cues should facilitate detection of other race faces and cues of other race membership should facilitate detection of anger. Past research investigating this race by emotional expression interaction in categorisation tasks revealed an asymmetrical interaction. This suggests that cues of other race membership may facilitate the detection of angry faces but not vice versa. Utilising the same stimuli and procedures across two search tasks, participants were asked to search for targets defined by either race or emotional expression. Contrary to the results revealed in the categorisation paradigm, cues of anger facilitated detection of other race faces whereas differences in race did not differentially influence detection of emotion targets.