Raj Ghoshal, associate professor of sociology, examined Americans' views on whether an individual's race is up to that person.
Raj Ghoshal, associate professor of sociology, published the study “Who Sees Race as a Choice?” in “Sociological Forum,” the journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. The article examines the prevalence and distribution of racial voluntarism, the view that a person’s race is fully or partly up to that person.
Ghoshal argues that several background factors including increasing U.S. racial diversity and complexity, norms for not contradicting people’s identity claims, and 21st-century activists’ efforts to ground gender in self-identification rather than biology may have fueled a less-recognized but similar move towards claiming self-identification as a basis for one’s race. His study tests this possibility, drawing on nationally representative survey data from over 1,000 American adults.
The study finds that support for racial voluntarism is modest, but not trivial: about a quarter of Americans agree with it and another quarter are neutral. Racial voluntarism is only slightly less supported than the much better-known idea of gender self-determination. Voluntarism is especially concentrated among people who see their race as hard for others to identify correctly, Hispanic and Latin Americans, and those who feel uncertain about their own multiraciality.
Ghoshal’s study does not aim to support or oppose voluntarism, but rather to illuminate how Americans think about the bases for identities like race and gender. His original survey data collection was supported by Elon’s Faculty Research and Development.