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Mapping Racial Boundaries: For Whom Do Varying Racial Identities Decrease Happiness?

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Abstract

Racial boundaries are hard to measure but consequential for understanding larger processes of racial inequality. Some argue that the racial hierarchy is expanding to include a third category for non-black minority identities while others believe that a binary racial hierarchy will persist as many non-black minorities will come to be seen as white. I use the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 to investigate how racial identities that vary (either because racial identities changed across survey waves or because racial identities are incongruent with interviewer perceptions) speak to each of these theories. I assess the frequency of different racial variations and how different patterns of racial variations are associated with individuals’ perceived level of happiness. When racial identities vary across time, context, or the perception of others, the work required to negotiate a racial identity can take a psychological toll and may decrease happiness. I find support for the whitening hypothesis; the most common type of racial variation includes respondents classified as non-black minorities by a household member later claiming a white identity. And, for those individuals, claiming a white identity is congruent with how they are perceived by interviewers. In addition, only for individuals who crossed black boundaries is racial variability consequential to perceived happiness, evidencing a strong racial boundary between black and anything else and more permeability in the boundary between non-black minorities and whites.

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Notes

  1. Non-black minority populations are defined as people who identify singularly as Asian, American Indian, Latinx, or something else other than white or black. Classifying Latinx as a racial category is consistent with numerous empirical studies evidencing that the term Latinx is a racialized category (Brown et al. 2006; Campbell and Rogalin 2006; Feliciano 2016; Hitlin et al. 2007).

  2. An example of crossing a boundary between white and non-black minority would be someone claiming a white identity in one context and claiming a non-black minority identity in another. An example of crossing boundary between black and non-black would be someone claiming to be black in one context and claiming to be either white or a non-black minority in another. Crossing in either direction goes over the boundary.

  3. Rachel Dolezal was raised as a white child with two white parents; she actively engaged in doing race and claimed that she was African American. She became a chapter president of the NAACP. Her parents outed her as being white and falsely claiming a black identity. She subsequently lost her position as a chapter president of the NAACP.

  4. The NLSY is a panel study that follows the same respondents over time; most questions are asked face-to-face by an interviewer (98%) unless the question is sensitive, in which case computers are used.

  5. Coded as something else to match with how race was asked in 1997.

  6. Only 3% of interviewers selected more than one racial category—of those that did, 65% were white in combination with another race.

  7. Geocoded data at the tract level are not available in standard NLSY data sets; because the number of contested identities in this survey is so small—assessing by regional variance may be more productive and better protect anonymity.

  8. Not all variables in the model passed the Brant test, but all race variables did. To correct for violations of the parallel line assumption, I also ran models with GoLogit which allowed me to handle variables that violated the assumption. The results were the same, so I use ordered logit to present model coefficients more parsimoniously (Williams 2016).

  9. This finding is robust even when accounting for whether respondents were biracial.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Linda Renzulli, Dr. Kenneth Ferraro, Dr. Trenton Mize, and Dr. Richard Petts for their research assistance.

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    Amy L. Petts

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Petts, A.L. Mapping Racial Boundaries: For Whom Do Varying Racial Identities Decrease Happiness?. Race Soc Probl 11, 308–322 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09271-2

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