RSF grantees Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner recently published an important paper, entitled "Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States," in the American Journal of Sociology. Here is the 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.

At the Inequalities Blog, Brendan Saloner, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the paper's significance:

[The article] finds that an astonishing one fifth of individuals in the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) experienced at least one change in racial classification over a 19-year period. These changes were not random. Negative life events, such as incarceration, unemployment, and divorce increased the probability of being identified as “black” in a successive year, while positive outcomes increased the probability of being identified as “white.” Often these changes were short-lived – and people would resume their former racial classification after a year or two, but in some cases the changes were long lasting over adulthood.

Read the full paper here (subscription required).