Mixed Race Studies

Sociologist links poverty and employment to racial identity

University of California, Irvine
2009-01-05

Laura Rico, University Communications

Andrew Penner studies how social status shapes ethnicity

Andrew Penner studies how perception of race can change, depending on one’s social status.Losing your job or doing jail time can affect how people perceive your racial background, according to a recent study co-authored by Andrew Penner, UC Irvine sociology assistant professor. His research shows people who were identified by others as white were significantly less likely to be seen in the same way over time if they had fallen below the poverty line or spent time in prison. Participants who self-identified as white also were less likely to see themselves the same way if they encountered those hardships. The study suggests that racial identity is fluid and changes with one’s position in society. Penner discussed the impact of his research and why race still matters…

Q: What surprised you most about your findings?

A:  The widespread pattern of our results was surprising. Many people assume that our findings apply only to people who don’t fit readily into racial categories, such as those who are multiracial. But we found that roughly 20 percent of the population experiences at least one change in how they are seen by others, which is much higher than you would expect if this were true only for multiracial people. What we actually found is that once we removed all of the multiracial people from the sample, we still got the same pattern of results. The same thing is true for Hispanics; many people assume that we got this pattern of results because people are not sure how to classify Hispanics, but when we looked only at non-Hispanics, the same pattern emerged. This suggests our results say something more general about definitions and perceptions of race in the U.S…

Read the entire article here.

How Social Status Shapes Race

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume 105, Number 50 (2008-12-16)
pages 19628-19630
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805762105

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Edited by Michael Hout, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in
part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or identified previously. This is consistent with the view that race is not a fixed individual attribute, but rather a changeable marker of status.

Read the entire article here.

Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Variation between Racial Self-Identification and Interviewer Classification

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
10 pages

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Recent research has demonstrated the existence of fluidity in both racial self-identification and interviewer classification. Racial self-identification has been shown to vary for the same individuals across contexts (Harris and Sim 2002), over time (Doyle and Kao 2007; Hitlin et al. 2006) and depending on their social position (Penner and Saperstein 2008). Similarly, interviewer classifications of the same individuals have been shown to vary over time (Brown et al. 2007), as well as change in response to biographical events such as incarceration, unemployment and experiencing a spell of poverty (Penner and Saperstein 2008). However, the specific pattern of variation between racial self-identification and interviewer classification—i.e., how they might influence each other over time—has yet to be empirically explored.

The prevailing assumption in the literature on racial identity is that people calibrate or edit their self-identification based on how they are perceived by others (e.g., Nagel 1994). We propose to test this hypothesis directly by examining what happens when there is discordance between an individual’s perceived and self-identified race, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. This is a crucial, and up to now missing, piece of the puzzle of whether and how different measures of race relate to one another. Additional analyses will also provide insight into how differences in life chances, such as educational attainment and contact with the criminal justice system, affect how respondents racially identify, are perceived by others and how both change over time.

Read the entire paper here.