Associate Professor of Sociology Raj Ghoshal’s new study finds that people think about racial group membership using two seemingly contradictory lenses.
New published research by Elon sociologist Raj Ghoshal examines whether Americans think of racial group membership as categorical and absolute—people simply do or do not belong to a racial group—or gradational, meaning that people can belong to a category to varying degrees.
Ghoshal surveyed over a thousand Americans and asked a battery of questions designed to examine who adopts which view of racial group membership and under what conditions. His study, “Americans’ Race Concepts as Categorical and Continuous,” was recently published in Social Currents, the official journal of the Southern Sociological Society.
Ghoshal’s research grows out of a tension between different ways of thinking about race. In formal contexts, racial group membership is usually conceived of as binary—one simply is, or is not, part of a group. But informally, nearly all Americans are familiar with claims that people who lack cultural connection or shared experiences, are of mixed descent, look atypical, or do not speak the language associated with their ancestry, are less a part of the group than same-race others.
Ghoshal found that most Americans say that they see race only categorically and claim to reject the idea of varying degrees of membership, but frequently draw on gradational understandings of race in concrete scenarios. For instance, some respondents who said they rejected the idea of degrees of membership nonetheless indicated that they would think of a mixed-ancestry person as “less part of” their racial group than someone whose parents both hailed from that group. The same pattern prevailed for prompts such as comparisons of those who do not speak the language traditionally associated with their ancestry to those who do, or of those who strongly self-identify as part of a group versus those who do not.
The study also found variation in these patterns by age, ideology and race. Americans who came of age after former President Barack Obama’s rise to prominence were more likely to embrace the idea of racial group membership as sometimes continuous, while very liberal and very conservative respondents united in rejecting the idea of gradational belonging more than other groups. Black Americans were especially rejecting of gradational ideas of race in the abstract, but all groups of color were more likely than Whites to embrace this idea when considering concrete examples.
The study contributes to a growing literature on the multidimensionality and complexity of race, especially research that has called attention to variation in treatment and identity based on skin tone, language proficiency and national origin.