What’s in a racial label?
by Tom Sullivan
Esther J. Cepeda’s Washington Post op-ed discusses a study by Emory University researchers, “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks’”. Specifically, the study looked at how white people responded to the two terms and their attached stereotypes. Notice, there’s as much class as race here:
The researchers conducted four distinct studies in the realms of employment, media and criminal justice to determine the perceptions of the two labels in different contexts.
The data they collected point to whites believing that the label “Black” evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status, education, positivity, competence and warmth than the label “African-American.” And whites “will react more negatively” toward “Blacks” than toward “African-Americans.”
Even more chilling, the researchers found that use of the label “Black” in a newspaper crime report is associated with more negative emotional words than in an article featuring the words “African-American.” And whites view a criminal suspect more negatively when that person is identified as “Black” versus “African-American.”
Wonder how they’d react to calling them “citizens” or “people”? Or “neighbors”?
I noticed how both Cepeda and I both typed lower case above when writing “white” as though it is an ordinary adjective and less of a racial label, while the study prefers “White.” Race is always there, Cepeda notes, because “no matter how post-racial any of us thinks we are, we’re all carrying around varying degrees of racial and ethnic bias.”
For example, this reference in the report to another study jumped out at me for some reason:
Participants, who were predominantly White Americans, rated “poor Blacks” low in both warmth and competence and perceived them similarly to poor Whites and welfare recipients (Figure 1, p. 885, 887, Fiske et al., 2002). Conversely, participants rated “Black professionals” as having high competence and high warmth and perceived them similarly to Americans, the middle class, Christians, the Irish, and housewives (Figure 2, p. 638, Cuddy et al., 2007).
The Irish? HEY! What’s up with that?
