A Conversation on Race and Colorism in Social Forces
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Selected references from this article are available for free public access for 3 months: Biagas (2016) https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sov070; Harris (1993) https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/72.2.451; Hochschild (2007) https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/86.2.643; Monk (2014) https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sou007; Ostfeld (2021) https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab060 It is now widely recognized in sociology that racialized inequality is a persistent structural phenomenon that infiltrates every aspect of life. However, at the inception of Social Forces in 1922, dominant perspectives on race and inequality spanned a continuum, from biological racism—focused on inherent biological inferiorities—to paternalistic attitudes guided by desires to help those deemed less fortunate. The leadership of the journal originally held similar views (see Kalleberg and Newell 2022). Yet, with significant changes to society, politics, and culture, scholarship published in the journal on race and racism incorporated different perspectives of racialized inequality and helped to capture the consequences of its ubiquity. A recent content analysis of Social Forces articles since the 1940s that appears in this issue (Moody, Edelmann, and Light 2022) identified a cluster on race that contained 175 articles. The top cited articles on race covered a variety of issues, including political and economic conditions shaping racial violence (Olzak 1990), racial and ethnic differences in beliefs on the causes of poverty (Hunt 1996), Whites attitudes regarding affirmative action (Kluegel and Smith 1983), and racial identification among biracial children with one Asian parent (Xie and Goyette 1997). The most cited and representative articles, however, focused on race relations, interactions, and attitudes, generally in response to increased interracial contact that resulted from mass desegregation efforts. For example, the top cited paper on race is Sigelman and Welch (1993). This article re-examined the contact hypothesis, or whether interracial contact was associated with positive attitudes toward different racial groups. While finding that White people were less likely than Black people to perceive Black-White social relations as hostile, they demonstrated that friendships and neighborhood contact significantly affected perceptions of racial hostility for both racial groups. Another top cited paper expanded the scope beyond Black-White group relations to include Hispanic and Asian populations. Dixon (2006) documented that the degree of contact matters in determining perceptions of threat or harmony. Specifically, he found that superficial contact with Hispanic and Asian people led to White people holding less prejudicial attitudes toward these groups, yet superficial contact with Black people did not change White people’s perception of them as a threat. It was only with more meaningful and close connections that White people tended to hold less prejudicial attitudes toward Black people. In a third highly cited article, Powers and Ellison (1995) investigated issues of selection bias and causality in studies on racial and ethnic relations and attitudes, particularly those that focus on the contact hypotheses. They found no evidence of selection bias, which would have suggested that pre-existing racial attitudes amongst Black people determined the likelihood of whether they sought and formed meaningful interracial contact. Rather, their findings suggested that close interracial friendships enabled Black Americans to gather information that may counter negative images and stereotypes of Whites. Taken together, some of the most influential articles on race published in Social Forces highlight the importance of close interracial contact for changing race relations and attitudes. Moreover, additional findings from the content analysis—that race was among the most cross-linked of the clusters identified—suggested that race was intimately related to a host of other topics covered in the journal. When coupled with themes from the top cited articles on race, it appears the intellectual landscape of the field as defined by the journal includes race and racial inequality as a common thread, with an emphasis on the consequences of social, political, economic, legal, and cultural transformations across time and contexts on race relations and attitudes, and changes to the social positioning of racialized groups. Such themes appear and are further complicated throughout the pages of Social Forces via research on skin tone and colorism. Colorism is a global structural and ideological system of inequality that affords those with lighter skin complexions advantages over their darker-skinned counterparts. Consequently, skin tone serves as a basis for constructing and reinforcing racial categories and hierarchies both in the United States and abroad. Research on skin tone and colorism, particularly in the United States, echo previous trends in the work on race in Social Forces by documenting the consequences of changes in the social positioning of groups. Indeed, scholars anticipated shifts to the racial structure and race relations in the United States in response to recent population trends (e.g., increases in interracial unions, non-White immigration, and socioeconomic mobility and assimilation among non-White groups). Among these arguments is that the US racial hierarchy is becoming more akin to a pigmentocracy, in which there will be a “more complex and loosely-organized tri-racial stratification system” (Bonilla-Silva 2004: 932) that places more emphasis on skin complexion (Bonilla-Silva 2004). Changes in the social power and position of individuals previously considered part of a similar minoritized group have significant implications for the nature and degree of racial inequality in the past and ongoing. In what follows, we will discuss research on colorism that has been published in Social Forces in more detail, focusing on eight studies. These studies span different contexts, mainly the United States and Latin America, and capture a variety of methods and outcomes. We highlight general findings of this scholarship and the central themes that have emerged on the topic. We end by discussing opportunities for furthering the study of colorism. In Social Forces, research on skin tone provides unique insight into how colorism operates across contexts and shapes patterns of inequality. Collectively, the findings have produced critical knowledge across three key domains: racial hierarchies, socioeconomic stratification, and political outcomes. Studies in Latin American contexts have focused on the role of skin tone in constructing racial categories and hierarchies. For example, Harris et al. (1993) used an emic approach to examine the effects of assuming individuals subscribe to a Black/White racial hierarchy, which has historically dominated the US racial order, on racial classification and enumeration in Brazil. The authors conducted a split census in which respondents were asked to choose their racial identity by free and forced choices (e.g., from a predefined list of racial categories). Two sets of forced choice categories were examined that included different terms referring to mixed-race. One set included the imposed census category of parda and the other substituted parda for the more vernacular term, morena. They found that the proportion of individuals who self-identified as mixed-race increased when the term morena was used over parda. Moreover, including morena as an option reduced the number of individuals who would identify as either pretos (black) or brancos (white). These findings illustrated that imposing racial classification schemas from outside Brazil obfuscates the existing racial hierarchies and can make it difficult to measure and understand the effects of discrimination and inequality amongst the population. Building on Harris’s et al. emic approach (1993), Gravlee (2005) explored racial classification schemas in Puerto Rico and their relationship to other phenotype characteristics. The study assessed whether and to what extent people shared a cultural understanding between skin tone and racial categorization. Gravlee employed two sets of ethnographic interviews: one where respondents listed all the color categories they knew and another where respondents selected from facial recognition portraits that best reflected respondents’ combination of phenotypic features (e.g., lip size, nose width, hair type, and skin tone). In both sets of interviews, Gravlee (2005) found five salient racial categories—blanco, trigueño, indio, negro, and jabao—where “distinctions among color categories depend primarily on contrasts in skin color and hair form” (p. 957). Within this schema, those with darker skin tones and kinky hair were negro, those with lighter skin and kinky hair were jabao, those with lighter skin and straight hair were blanco, those with darker skin and straight hair were indio, and those in the middle in terms of hair texture and color were trigueño. These skin color/hair texture categories were culturally understood and shared throughout the region. Other work in Social Forces has provided evidence of movement beyond a strict Black-White binary in terms of hierarchies within the United States. For example, Biagas and Bianchi (2016) used an experimental design to formally test the Latin Americanization thesis (LAT), which argues that the US racial order is shifting from a Black-White binary system to a tri-racial system with Whites at the top, a new group of Honorary Whites in the middle, and a Collective Black group at the bottom (Bonilla-Silva 2004). According to this thesis, skin color is a main determinant of placement in these categories. The study assessed whether and how stratification within student task groups aligned with the proposed LAT racial order. Within the experiment, White college students were assigned a partner of a given race/ethnicity (Latino or White) and skin tone (dark, light, white) and asked whether they would accept input from this partner on a task. The researchers argued that the degree to which White individuals would accept influence from partners signaled understandings of perceived status and competence of other groups. Findings showed that White participants were more likely to accept influence from other White partners than from the Honorary White group (e.g., light-skinned Latino students); and more likely to accept influence from Honorary Whites than from the Collective Black group (e.g., dark-skinned Latino students). Further analyses showed that both skin tone and ethnicity worked together to determine the observed tripartite system rather than just race/ethnicity or skin tone. Such findings provided evidence that it is not just race/ethnicity that matters for stratification and understandings of status hierarchies in the United States, but also skin tone. The downstream consequences of colorism for life chances have also been well-documented in Social Forces, with several papers examining socioeconomic stratification within minoritized population groups in the United States. For example, Hughes and Hertel (1990) used data from the National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) to examine the relationship between skin color and socioeconomic status among Black adults. Using a measure of interviewer-rated skin tone, the authors found that lighter-skinned respondents had higher levels of education, occupational prestige, and income than their darker-skinned counterparts, and were more likely to have spouses with higher educational attainment and occupational prestige. Moreover, the extent of socioeconomic inequality between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned Black adults was similar to the inequality between Black and White adults. They also found that skin color stratification was generally comparable across gender and age groups and did not change substantially between 1950 and 1980. The authors concluded that skin color continued to structure life chances for Black Americans despite changes in American society that improved the political and social status of minoritized groups. Gullickson (2005) challenged this notion of the continuing significance of skin color. He noted that prior work, including that of Hughes and Hertel, based their conclusions on aggregate data across periods, which did not account for the possibility of cohort differences. He argued that the transformation of the racial system in the United States, influenced by the Civil Rights movement, the fight against Nazism, and profound changes to the urban economy, may have led to reduced skin tone differentials in life outcomes among younger cohorts of Black Americans, as cohorts varied in exposure to this new vs. older racial system. Gullickson (2005) tested this argument using four waves of data from the NSBA and one wave of data from the General Social Survey. Results suggested that beginning with cohorts born in the 1940s, skin color differences in education and occupational prestige declined. The significance of skin color for the marriage market, however, remained unchanged. Overall, findings provided insight into how skin tone hierarchies can shift within the context of social movements and over time. Monk (2014) contributed to this debate on the significance of skin color by examining the extent to which skin color stratification persisted for Black Americans in the 21st century. Monk used more recent national data from the National Survey of American Life to evaluate the continued significance of skin tone among younger cohorts. Consistent with results from Hughes and Hertel (1990), lighter skin tone was significantly associated with higher levels of income, education, and occupational status, as well as having spouses with lighter skin tones and higher educational attainment. Several explanations for this continued significance of skin tone were presented. The first was informed by theoretical arguments of a potential pigmentocracy emerging in the United States and prior evidence suggesting that individuals were less able to suppress skin color biases compared with racial biases. Thus, skin color discrimination may remain or increase even if racial discrimination decreases. Another explanation argued that individuals often conflate the concepts of race and color, which can obscure the distinctiveness of the concept and consequences of colorism/skin color from racism/race. Monk concluded by asserting the need to look beyond census racial categories when studying inequality, as a reliance on strictly racial comparisons can hide complex realities. This sentiment of the complexity of skin color stratification was demonstrated earlier by Hochschild and Weaver (2007) using the NSBA and several national and regional surveys. While the researchers documented that lighter skin was associated better socioeconomic outcomes (e.g., higher levels of education and income) and a greater likelihood of occupying elected official positions, they also found that skin color did not predict political beliefs and attitudes among Black Americans; results showed almost no differences by skin color in perceptions of group discrimination, individual discrimination, judgments of linked fate, and racial identity. Such findings were inconsistent with a host of prior work, leading the authors to term this pattern the ``skin color paradox''. Hochschild and Weaver argued that racial identity and the broader political context could help to explain this paradox. Specifically, given the reigning “one drop rule”—in which any individual with at least one (known) Black ancestor (e.g., had one drop of “Black” blood) was deemed Black—and the fight for racial equality during the Civil Rights Movement, Blackness became recognized as a primary form of marginalization for which Black Americans would mobilize against. In this way, skin color differences became a secondary form of marginalization that took a backseat to efforts to combat racial injustice. Put simply, combating racial inequality trumped combating color inequality. Consequently, Black Americans of all skin shades identified with a Black racial identity. It was this identification with a Black racial identity and mobilization around racial inequality that led to similar political beliefs and attitudes. Ostfeld and Yadon (2021) also examined the relationship between skin color and political views among Latino Americans in Detroit and Chicago. They used machine-ratings of respondent skin color produced by a light reflectance spectrophotometer in addition to respondents’ self-assessment of their skin tone along a 10-point scale. The use of both measures helped to evaluate the extent to which respondents see themselves as darker or lighter according to an objective rating, providing insight into the effects of perceptions on lived experiences. They found that Latino Americans who rated themselves as lighter and/or overestimated their lightness (e.g., perceived themselves as lighter than the machine ratings) held fewer liberal positions on contemporary racialized political issues (e.g., support for Trump; evaluations of police officer use of force). Conversely, those who rated themselves as darker and/or overestimated their skin darkness took more liberal positions on racialized political issues. Based on these findings, Otsfeld and Yadon argued that skin color can operate as a political statement, which may work to further blur the traditional boundaries of racial categories in the United States. The works published in Social Forces on skin tone and colorism expand our understanding of racial categories, race relations, and social hierarchies, specifically around their applicability in differing contexts and their changes over time. The articles reviewed demonstrate the consequences of imposed racial schemas—schemas that do not account for unique lived experiences or culturally shared understandings of race and color—on racial identification, stratification, and inequality. That is, findings from Harris et al. (1993) and Gravlee (2005) suggest that the US’s binary Black/White schema neglects the ways that racial categorization is more fluid and nuanced in Latin America. Imposing institutional racial hierarchies from outside of a given context over vernacular and culturally shared racial categories therefore has implications for measuring and interpreting stratification and inequality. Studies published in Social Forces also provide further evidence that skin color is an important source of within-group heterogeneity in resources (Hughes and Hertel 1990; Monk 2014; Hochschild and Weaver 2007), which, at times, is equivalent to between-group heterogeneity (e.g., race disparities). Findings from published scholarship also indicate how skin color tone is used in society to demonstrate and enact power and status, whether that power/status be self-imposed (e.g., Ostfeld and Yadon 2021) or imposed socially (e.g., Biagas and Bianchi 2016). A common thread running through the studies in Social Forces is the warning that the persistent conflation of race and color, that while related concepts, can negate and obscure intraracial stratification and inequality across contexts. While important knowledge of colorism and its widespread consequences have been printed in the pages of Social Forces, we highlight three additional areas for research. The first is to examine skin tone inequality across diverse stratification outcomes such as health disparities, policing, and differences in educational and school disciplinary outcomes, carceral system outcomes, and political attitudes and involvement (Harris et al. 1993; Monk in these areas is important given how from the and the have increased of and exposure to structural work could also the skin color within other and whether this particularly the and the Black A for research an to the among colorism, and other of inequality. Indeed, of stratification unique social experiences and contexts that structure social realities. research could include an analysis of and and more groups and contexts outside of the United States and Latin America. work could also the implications of the LAT on the relationship between skin tone and racial hierarchies, stratification, and political outcomes. the studies published in Social Forces demonstrate the varied to studying skin color hierarchies and the and consequences of colorism. studies have generally on to measure skin tone, which, measures of race and are to as a for the effects of colorism. However, research on colorism in the United States could also from emic (e.g., Gravlee Harris et al. to if in the relationship between skin color and racial categories. Indeed, population changes and social trends may to new or of stratification and categories of scholars shifts in the racial and more research is to identify such changes and them into scholarship and changes to race relations, attitudes, and racial stratification in ways that account for throughout work published in Social Forces since its to perspectives and understandings and inequality. is an of and a at the at the of at research how and racialized in health across the life work has been by the National of and the and recent appear in and the of among other is an of and a at the at the of at research at the of and critical in police violence against and work has been published in and Social and by the National and for Social
Source: Social Forces
DOI: 10.1093/sf/soac045
Authors: Taylor Hargrove, Shannon Malone Gonzalez
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4286001408