To Be or Not to Be (Black or Multiracial or White)

Abstract

Culture shapes the meaning of race and, consequently, who is placed into which racial categories. Three experiments conducted in the United States and Brazil illustrated the cultural nature of racial categorization. In Experiment 1, a target’s racial ancestry influenced Americans’ categorizations but had no impact on Brazilians’ categorizations. Experiment 2 showed cultural differences in the reliance on two phenotypic cues to race; Brazilians’ categorizations were more strongly determined by skin tone than were Americans’ categorizations, and Americans’ categorizations were more strongly determined by other facial features compared to Brazilians' categorizations. Experiment 3 demonstrated cultural differences in the motivated use of racial categories. When the racial hierarchy was threatened, only Americans more strictly enforced the Black–White racial boundary. Cultural forces shape the conceptual, perceptual, and ideological construal of racial categories.

An integrative review of impression formation processes for multiracial individuals

“…Several studies on the perception of racially ambiguous faces document that they are more frequently categorized as Black compared to White (Chen, Couto, et al, , Experiment 3; Cooley, Brown‐Iannuzzi, Brown, & Polikoff, ; Freeman, Pauker, & Sanchez, ; Krosch & Amodio, ; Krosch, Berntsen, Amodio, Jost, & Van Bavel, ; see also Gaither, Chen, Pauker, & Sommers, ), consistent with hypodescent . Their findings advance our understanding of face categorization processes, though their conclusions are limited because the majority of this research has been conducted with exclusively or predominantly White American samples.…”

“…Americans continue to apply hypodescent to Black‐White people today (Chen, Couto, Sacco, & Dunham, , Experiment 1; Ho, Kteily, & Chen, ; Ho, Sidanius, Cuddy, & Banaji, ; Ho, Sidanius, Levin, & Banaji, ; Noyes & Keil, , Experiment 4; Peery & Bodenhausen, , Experiment 1; Roberts & Gelman, , ). There are dispositional and situational factors that impact the likelihood that perceivers do so.…”

“…Investigating perceivers in other cultural contexts is important for documenting the wide spectrum of psychological processes that contribute to race perception and the maintenance of racial boundaries. For example, Chen, Couto, et al (, Experiment 3) found that the motivation to protect the status quo predicted increased Black categorizations of ambiguous faces among Americans but was associated with decreased Black categorizations of ambiguous faces among Brazilians. The authors argued that this psychological divergence is related to the fact that, historically, American society protected social stratification using hypodescent, whereas Brazilian society protected social stratification by encouraging disadvantaged Blacks to “self‐whiten” by marrying non‐Black individuals (i.e., endorsing upward mobility as a means to get out of the Black category).…”

Black + White = Not White: A minority bias in categorizations of Black-White multiracials

“…Specifically, hypodescent arose in a context that was characterized by a Black-White dichotomy, that is, in which race relations in America were largely centered on Black-White relations (Jordan, 2014). Many studies on multiracial categorization mirror that historic racial dichotomy, using paradigms in which perceivers choose whether the target is Black or White (e.g., Chen et al, 2017;Ho et al, 2011Ho et al, , 2013Krosch et al, 2013;Peery & Bodenhausen, 2008, Experiment 1). Yet, people may not think in racially dichotomous, or "Black and White," terms.…”

Multiple racial identities as sources of psychological resilience

“…Relatedly, when White people moved from a less diverse location in the continental United States to the more diverse Hawai'i, they expressed lower race essentialist beliefs over time because they made more racially diverse friends (Pauker et al, ). Scholars also have begun to study cultural variation in the way U.S. (smaller multiracial population) and Brazilian (larger multiracial population) use ancestry and phenotype to categorize people as Black, White, or biracial (Chen, Couto, Sacco, & Dunham, ). Future work should examine the interplay between contextual (e.g., demographic composition) and individual (e.g., identity management strategy) factors in shaping multiracial individuals experiences and outcomes.…”