Study details the power of negative racial stereotypes
Changes in social circumstances such as falling below the poverty line or being sent to jail made people more likely to be perceived as black and less likely to be seen as white, researchers say.
Barack Obama's election as president may be seen as a harbinger of a color-blind society, but a new study suggests that derogatory racial stereotypes are so powerful that merely being unemployed makes people more likely to be viewed by others -- and to even see themselves -- as black.
In a long-term survey of 12,686 people, changes in social circumstances such as falling below the poverty line or being sent to jail made people more likely to be perceived as black and less likely to be seen as white. Altogether, the perceived race of 20% of the people in the study changed at least once over a 19-year period, according to the study to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers have long recognized that a person's race affects his or her social status, but the study is the first to show that social status also affects the perception of race.
Racial stereotypes: An article in Tuesday's Section A about a recent study that found that people who fall into poverty or go to jail are more likely to self-identify and be perceived as black included this passage: "Changes in racial perceptions -- whether from outside or within -- were likely concentrated among those of mixed ethnicity, researchers said." That comment was made by researchers who were not a part of the study. The study's authors did not make such a speculation and say their results do not support such conclusions.
Penner and Aliya Saperstein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, examined data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Though the ongoing survey is primarily focused on the work history of Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s, participants have also provided interviewers with information on a variety of topics, including health, marital status, insurance coverage and race.
On 18 occasions between 1979 and 1998, interviewers wrote down whether the people they spoke with were "white," "black" or "other."
The researchers found that people whom the interviewers initially perceived as white were roughly twice as likely to be seen as nonwhite in their next interview if they had fallen into poverty, lost their job or been sent to prison. Meanwhile, people previously perceived as black were twice as likely to continue being seen as black if any of those things had happened to them.
For example, 10% of people previously described as white were reclassified as belonging to another race if they became incarcerated. But if they stayed out of jail, 4% were reclassified as something other than white, the study said.
The effect has staying power. People who were perceived as white and then became incarcerated were more likely to be perceived as black even after they were released from prison, Penner said.
