Russel Sage Foundation

A dialogue between former RSF Visiting Scholars Aliya Saperstein (Stanford University) and Richard Alba (CUNY Graduate Center), and a number of other researchers, appears in the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology. A 2012 paper by Saperstein and Andrew Penner, titled “Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States,” explored whether a given individual’s racial identity was “a flexible propensity rather than a fixed characteristic”—or subject to change based on that individual’s social status. Using data from the 1979 National Longitude Study of Youth (NLSY), they argued that whether a person identified or was perceived as either white or black could shift based on whether that person had under gone an experience associated with race by the public, such as incarceration or using welfare benefits.

In the latest issue of AJS, Alba and co-authors Scarlett Lindeman and Noura Insolera address Saperstein and Penner in a paper titled “Is Race Really So Fluid?” They argue that the white-black racial fluidity observed by Saperstein and Penner in their sample is statistically small, and that the NLSY shows that “racial fluidity is less common than Saperstein and Penner assert.” According to Alba and co-authors, the most racial fluidity takes place among Hispanic and mixed-raced people. They state, “Non-Hispanic whites and blacks exhibit very little fluidity, either in terms of their identities or the ways they are perceived by others.”

Saperstein and Penner respond to this critique, and others, in a new paper for AJS. Their abstract reads:

Our reply addresses the three main points of empirical critique across the two comments: (1) that a relationship between social status and racial categorization of similar direction and magnitude could be produced by measurement error; (2) that our findings are neither as common nor as generalizable as we claimed; and (3) that we did not adequately demonstrate that stereotypes, operating through what the interviewer does or does not hear about the respondent, are a key causal mechanism. We either provide evidence that directly refutes each point, explain why it results from a misreading of our argument, or both. In the process, we underscore our earlier findings with additional evidence of how social factors shape categorization: through selective processes of 'ethnic attrition' as well as what interviewers knew about the respondents’ use of crack cocaine.

The conversation is available in full from AJS.