Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2008
Barack Obama’s election as president may be seen as a harbinger of a colorblind 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 even 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 by interviewers 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 published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
{snip}
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.
“Race isn’t a characteristic that’s fixed at birth,” said UC Irvine sociologist Andrew Penner, one of the study’s authors. “We’re perceived a certain way and identify a certain way depending on widely held stereotypes about how people believe we should behave.”
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.”
{snip}
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 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.
{snip}
Of the people who said they were white in 1979 and stayed out of jail, 95% said they were white in 2002. Among those who were incarcerated at some point, however, only 81% still said they were white in 2002.
The results underscore “the pervasiveness of racial stratification in society,” said Emeka. “The fact that both beholders and the observers of blackness attach negative associations to blackness speaks volumes to the continuing impact of racial stratification in U.S. society.”
But Robert T. Carter, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia Teachers College in New York who studies race, culture and racial identity, said he wasn’t convinced that stereotypes had the power to change the perception of race.
{snip}
To see if the changes were the result of simple recording errors made when interviewers filled out their surveys, the researchers checked how often a participant’s gender changed from one year to the next. They found changes in 0.27% of cases, suggesting that interviewers weren’t being sloppy.
They also looked for subjects who were interviewed by the same person two years in a row. Even in those cases, the results were the same.
{snip}
[Editor’s Note: “How Social Status Shapes Race,” by Andrew Penner and Aliya Saperstein has not yet been published on-line. It is to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Original article
Email
Karen Kaplan
at karen.kaplan@latimes.com .
(Posted on December 11, 2008)
Comments
“Race isn’t a characteristic that’s fixed at birth…”
True. Race is a characteristic that’s fixed at conception.
“Barack Obama’s election as president may be seen as a harbinger of a colorblind society, …”
Seen by whom? The 70% to 85% of blacks who voted for him in the primaries as opposed to a white women who was just as liberal? (And also the wife of our “First Black President.)
Liberals may laugh at me, but this is one reason people behave badly and have bad manners. If we go along with this ‘scientific survey’ here, instead of having a bad opinion of people who act ‘ghetto’, black or white, we are supposed to celebrate these attributes. Celebrate and worship their street-cred. Some more than others. But having a suspect opinion of those who behave properly, or of the privileged among us? that’s quite encouraged as ‘scholarship’, and A-Ok. At least, according to Columbia Teachers College.
Yet more attempts to deconstruct the concept of race…. If police using DNA evidence can deduce race accurately, I guess that sometimes the eye can be fooled. For example, is Obama White or Black. If he wants to be president, he’s Black. If he wants to rub elbows with the rich and powerful, he’s going to act and speak as White as possible. Mulattos are mixed, which simplifies the confusion. Idi Amin would never be mistaken by himself or others as White, even though he was a criminal.
So people are more likely to associate blacks with criminal activity and unemployment? For the life of me I can’t imagine why that is.
Most of the reason many people assume that a person who is unemployed, on welfare, failing in school, resident of a crime ridden slum and a total loser is because the black establishment, their white advocates, the government, and of course the media continually blast out long, loud and often that blacks are poor, unemployed, on welfare, residents of crime ridden slums and failures at school.
They are pitiful victims incapable of doing anything we must give money to them. We must excuse them from the consequences of their crimes. We must give them college degrees although they cannot read and write. That’s the mantra, so people believe it.
For instance, I am old enough to remember that “hispanic” did not exist. There were white people with Spanish names, just as there were whites with Irish, Italien or Polish names. Spanish named whites were just like other whites.
Then in 1970 or so the Ford Foundation created the “hispanic” race, a race of pitiful losers, unable to cope with anything, unable to finish 8th grade, discriminated against, on welfare, in prison etc.
After a few years of that I began to think hispanics were the total losers in need of massive government help just to get through the day the Ford Foundation claimed they were.
Of course the Ford Foundation front groups importation of millions of 4ft8 IQ 85 Indian gangsters from Latin America has made their vision of Spanish named people true, hispanics, violent, on welfare and criminal.
There was a great line from the musical Evita! “She didn’t say much, but she said it loud….and often.”
Jacka$$, Sharpton and the government and media have been telling us blacks are total underclass losers for so long people naturally assume it is so.
The liberals have no one to blame for this perception but themselves.
Race is not a characteristic. Certain behaviors, however, are more characteristic of some races than others. (See generally, FBI Uniform Crime Reports)
Of course being incarcerated resulted in race changes. Many mestizos are now classified as white. When jailed this MUST alter for the sake of order and safety, given that prison gangs are biologically racial, and that NEVER changes.
Professor Carter is right, and those people who did the “study” are whacked in the head — or intentionally lying to try to prove a point. In this country, among Caucasians and Africans, you’re either White, or black, or mulatto. Nobody is so borderline that his appearance fools any significant number of people. Those things only happen in such cloud-cuckoo tales as the 1960s film “I Passed For White.”
This is just another case of top-lofty academics trying to make a case for alleged mistreatment of the “poor, mistreated, noble black man.” Baloney!
Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong. I read through this whole convoluted piece of garbage article and didn’t see a single clue indicating whether these interviews were conducted face to face or by telephone.
I’ll e-mail our reporter and she what she has to say.
This study assumes there is no actual link between being “black” or “white” and being employed or incarcerated.
It would be as if I did a study and asked people whether 7-day-old leftovers smelled “OK” or “funny.” Then, I asked different subjects to eat the leftovers. Afterwards, the people who sniffed the leftovers that got people sick might decide that the leftovers must have smelled “funny” after all. In the future, they might also think similar smelling leftovers were to be avoided. The subjects who sniffed food that did not get other people sick would think the leftovers must have been “OK” and would think similar smelling leftovers were also “OK.”
My study would tell you nothing about whether preconceived notions of what “OK” and “funny” smells like would make one sick.
“Race isn’t a characteristic that’s fixed at birth,” said UC Irvine sociologist Andrew Penner, one of the study’s authors. “We’re perceived a certain way and identify a certain way depending on widely held stereotypes about how people believe we should behave.”
Ah, but DNA is indeed fixed at birth, and a person’s DNA can be used quite effectively to identify that person’s race. Indeed, DNA should be the primary means for race identification, rather than the vague blabberings of a useless professor of a useless academic field about “perceptions” and “stereotypes.” (How did these “stereotypes” he speaks about get to be so “widely held” anyway? Was there some Masonic Lodge meeting centuries ago where these prescribed “perceptions” were all formulated and agreed on?)
This might be a problem for some mulattos, but not for me. I’ve been White all my life, and nobody has ever thought otherwise, even when I’ve been in trouble.
“UC Irvine sociologist: “Race isn’t a characteristic that’s fixed at birth.”
I didn’t read the article, and I’m not going to, because there’s nothing the L.A. Times or A UC Irvine dork could have to say worthwhile.
Sorry but leftist goof balls just don’t interest me.
My questions/suggestions for scientific studies:
“Race isn’t a characteristic that’s fixed at birth,” said UC Irvine sociologist Andrew Penner.”
He’s right and you know it. I’ve seen many a Japanese baby turn black around the early 20s. I myself was born the child of a poor black man but turned Asian at 14. My wife was born Hispanic but now is mostly Arabic with some Cherokee thrown in.
Listen to Prof. Penner. He’ll tell you what to do.
A white boy at age 19 who winds up busted in a meth lab situation at age 20 and comes out of prison at age 24 in all likelihood is going to “sound” very black to the pinheads conducting these telephone interviews. What else could one expect for such an individual after pulling four plus years of hard time? afterall, this individual spent 4 years talking with 14s.
When I glanced at this article and saw UC Irvine mentioned, being such a great liberal bastion of learning lies, I knew we’d be on the downhill mudslide throughout this article that deals with the pseudoscience of sociology. Now we can’t tell the difference between black and white???? We don’t know if we ourselves are black or white???? I guess tomorrow morning I could wake up and “perceive” myself as black. That’s scary. Yet looking in the mirror might tell me otherwise. My conclusion, however, would be that the mirror is flawed. The mirror crack’d? Ooops..couldn’t resist that.
Yet they have damned themselves by declaring that being jailed, being habitually unemployed and penniless, being losers in the intellectual games of life - are traits that distinguish blacks among the races.
I’m convinced that so many of our social problems would cease to exist if all people would condemn willful acts of bad behavior, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the perpetrator, and quit making excuses for it. 90% of the conflicts among whites revolve around what to do with non-productive or criminal people (whether native-born Americans or legal / illegal immigrants). It’s always been there but has only grown worse in the past few decades with the hugh influx of unassimilable people from the Third World.
I wonder, how Ms Aliya Saperstein perceives Jewishness. If this is also something that changes during the life. Can someone say that he/she is and on/off Jew?
They can’t be serious? I can they can get most Americans to buy this. After all, most Americans voted for the most anti-American anti-white half white person I have ever heard of in public life.
I am visiting in Colorado Springs today. I saw something very interesting. As my wife, daughter and I came out of a little restaurant from breakfast, we heard a loud commotion with people shouting. I looked across the street and saw two black men jumping up and down and shouting at something. I thought, “here we are in the middle of a white oasis and what the heck do we see but a couple of blacks acting like imbeciles.” Not only are people born to a race, they also make themselves into stereotypes.
Posted by at 5:44 PM on December 11 I am old enough to remember that “hispanic” did not exist. There were white people with Spanish names, just as there were whites with Irish, Italien or Polish names. Spanish named whites were just like other whites.
I think you’re getting Castilian Spanish and Hispanics confused. Remember, Spain is a country in Europe. The hispanic race was created not by the Ford Foundation but by the Conquistodores, when they invaded South America and Mexico and mixed with the natives there. It just seems to you that it all started in the 70’s because that’s when large-scale immigration really started taking hold.
Karen Kaplan is actually getting paid by the LA Times? Aside from the bizarre and convoluted “findings” she reports on in this piece, the story itself is a masterpiece of incoherence and disorganization. She must be a recent J-school grad.
“Race isn’t a characteristic that is fixed at birth”.
That’s good news. I have decided to become a subcontinental Indian. That way, I can work as a research chemist in the microelectronics industry again. I suppose I should change my name to Vishayanta or something similar, but would go by “Mike”.
