Racial Appraisals by White, Black, Hispanic, and Multiracial Americans

Abstract

Racial appraisals, defined as people’s judgments of other people’s race, influence racial inequality and discrimination, anti-discrimination efforts, and collective identity. I conduct a survey of 1,102 American adults of all races that builds on recent scholarship about how Americans assess others’ race, in two ways. First, I examine a wider range of cues for race than prior studies. I uncover novel evidence that self-identification and small group (family and intra-cultural) judgments shape appraisals, especially for Hispanic and Native American targets. I also find support for prior work showing that cues like appearance and ancestry are important signals. Second, I move beyond prior studies’ focus on White Americans’ appraisals; I examine how several different racial groups appraise race. I find some similarities but also striking differences, particularly in the wider range of experiential and small group cues that Black and Hispanic Americans use when assessing Whiteness, Blackness, and Latinidad, compared with Whites. I argue that four group-level differences in appraisal patterns uncovered here are rooted in specific aspects of America’s history of racial domination, and consider implications.