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Can Losing Your Job Make You Black?Aliya Saperstein

June 03, 2013

Most Americans think a persons race is fa irly obvious and unchanging; we know it the minute we

meet him or her. Similarly, most academic research also treats race as fixed and foreordained. A

persons race comes first and then his or her experiences, education, job, neighborhood, income,

and well-being follow. My research with sociologist Andrew Penner on how survey respondents were

classified by race over the course of their lives, calls into question this seemingly obvious fact.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth has been following a group of about 12,000 Americans

since they were teenagers and young adults in 1979. From 1979 to 1998, the survey interviewers had

to identify the race of the people they interviewed, even when those people had been repeatedly

interviewed. At the end of each session, interviewers recorded whether they thought a respondent

was Black, White, or Other . Here is the surprise: nearly 20 percent of respondents experienced

at least one change in their recorded race over those 19 years.

These changes were notrandom, as one might expect if the interviewers were just hurrying to finish

up or if the data-entry clerks were making mistakes. The racial classifications changed

systematically, in response to what had happened to the respondent since the previous interview.

All else being equal, including how they had been racially classified before, respondents who were

unemployed, had children outside of marriage, or lived in the inner city were less likely to beclassified as white and more likely to be classified as black. Having been incarcerated, unemployed,

divorced, or impoverished each reduced the chances by a perc entage point or two that someone who

was recorded as white by an interviewer one year would be seen as white again the next year.

Although the changes in race that appeared to be caused by any given change in social position were

small, all of the life outcomes we examined, including college graduation, teen parenthood, and

receiving welfare, affected changes in racial classification. Moreover, a cascade of woeful events

could add up to a notable alteration in someones race. Take a hypothetical 29-year-old father of

two who was classified as white by an interviewer. If he spent time before the next interview in jail,

became unemployed, got divorced, and fell into poverty, his likel ihood of being seen by an

interviewer as white the next time dropped from 96 percent (random fluctuation, given no changes

in his social position) to less than 85 percent. For positive experiences, the effects are in the opposite

direction.

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These changes line up in ways that reflect widespread racial stereotypes. Interviewers became

likelier to see someone as black the more the respondents situations fit the stereotype of black

peopleand vice-versa for white people.

The studies we have conducted show that while race shapes our life experiences, our life experiences

also shape our race. Race and perceptions of difference are not only a cause of inequality, they also

result from inequality. Americans racial stereotypes have become self-fulfilling prophecies: the

mental images Americans have of criminals and welfare queens, or college grads and suburbanites,can literally affect how we see each other.

Losing Your Job Make You Black? | Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/blog/can-losing-your-job-make-you-black?utm_...

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