Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States
Abstract
The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.
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Racial categorization operates both as an input and an output to racial inequality.
“Saperstein and Penner find that racial categorization operates both as an input and an output to racial inequality.”
From Towards a critical race methodology in algorithmic fairness (2020) · cites this paper as [105]
In survey responses, individuals who experience an increase in social position may be more likely to lighten themselves, while those who become more disadvantaged may darken themselves.
“Individuals who experience an increase in social position (e.g. increased income) may be more likely to “lighten” themselves in survey responses, while those who become more disadvantaged (e.g. experiencing unemployment or incarceration) may “darken” themselves [89, 105].”
From Towards a critical race methodology in algorithmic fairness (2020) · cites this paper as [105]
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On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
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Towards a critical race methodology in algorithmic fairness
Hanna, A., Denton, R., Smart, A., & Smith-Loud, J. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3351095.3372826 · Cited by 295 · see citing works
“encing unemployment or incarceration) may "darken" themselves [89, 105].”
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- Authors
- Saperstein, A., & Penner, A. M.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2012-11
- Volume
- 118
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 676-727
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- OpenAlex
- W1963835707
- Cited by
- 464
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 55 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 38 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 51 · 2018: 43 · 2017: 36 · 2016: 27 · 2015: 30 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 8
- FWCI
- 58.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Journal of Sociology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
- Keywords
- racial fluidity, racial inequality, social stratification, racial classification, self-identification, racialization, racial disparities, racial policy
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