USA Today reports on a new study which suggests that race is a ‘changeable marker of social status.’
The data collected between 1979 and 2002 and analyzed by sociologists at universities in California and Oregon show change over time in both racial self-identification and the way people perceive the racial identity of others.
“There is much less ‘agreement’ about what race a person is than is commonly thought,” says co-author Aliya Saperstein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon-Eugene, “Fluctuations in both self-identification and how one is perceived by others happen more often than they would or should if race is something obvious or unambiguous.”
And that leads to an even more striking result: Those who are unemployed, incarcerated or in poverty are more likely to be classified and self-identify as black than white, regardless of past identifications. In about 20% of the 12,686 respondents, at least one change was noted in an interviewer’s perception.
The study found that setbacks in social status made it more likely that someone would be seen as black.
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Contexts Crawler » the power of negative racial stereotypes — December 12, 2008
[...] the government streamlined its categories for race and ethnicity. Read the full story. Read the previous post on this work from the Crawler. addthis_url = [...]