(bright musical flourish)
- It's a pleasure to be welcoming you
to the State of Democracy lecture,
and I'm Grant Reeher.
I'm Director of the Campbell
Public Affairs Institute.
It's the institute that
coordinates the lecture series.
I wanted to extend a special
welcome to the parents
that are here for parents weekend.
Are there any parents here in the audience
that are here for that weekend?
One, two, a few, yes?
Great, great, thanks.
(audience applauds)
And also on behalf of the university,
I would like to acknowledge with respect
the Onondaga nation, the indigenous people
on whose ancestral lands
we are now sitting.
My colleagues Elizabeth
Cohen will have more to say
about Professor Aliya
Saperstein in a minute.
What I just wanna note here at the outset
is that race and ethnicity are always
at least in the background of
every political conversation
I think that takes place in America,
sometimes visible, sometimes not,
but it's always there.
This election season, however,
has put that topic front and center,
and so while Professor
Saperstein is not here to discuss
the election per se, and
after a year of little else,
I think that's okay with me,
Professor Saperstein's lecture
nonetheless on racial mobility
I think is especially timely.
And I wanna thank Elizabeth Cohen
for bringing Aliya to campus.
I also wanna thank the
Dean's office for supporting
the series and for technical support,
the Information and
Computing Technology group,
and in particular, Tom Fazzio.
Thanks as well and as always,
she's not here right now,
she'll be joining us later
to Kelly Coleman, who works
in the institute and helps
put together these events.
I also wanna give a very
special thanks to Norman
and Marsha Lee Berkman,
whose generous contribution
has made this lecture possible,
and they are either watching
over our livestream,
or they will see this later on the video.
So I wanna just take
a moment for all of us
to thank them for their support.
(audience applauds)
Now, I also wanna take
an additional moment,
if I can, to thank another
individual who's here,
Maxwell Associate Dean Michael Wasylenko,
who is going to be
returning to the faculty
at the end of this calendar year.
But over the years, Mike
has been a great friend
to this lecture series, but
also to the Campbell Institute,
and I just wanna say that
the Campbell Institute
and this institute director
are very grateful to him for that.
So thanks, Mike.
Thanks.
(audience applauds)
I have three reminders for you.
First, please silence your smart phones,
so keep them smart.
Second, when we get to the audience Q&A,
which we'll have following
Professor Saperstein's talk,
please wait for the
microphone to be passed to you
so that you're part of
our archive, and again,
so that people watching on the livestream
can hear your questions or your comments,
and then third, following the
talk, we'll have a reception
out in the foyer where
there will be refreshments,
and we can continue the
conversation that we begin here.
Now, finally, let me turn it
over to my Campbell colleague,
Elizabeth Cohen.
Elizabeth is a political science professor
here at the Maxwell School,
and in thinking about some
of Elizabeth's work, I can see
why there's this connection
between her and Professor Saperstein,
because as Professor
Saperstein has complicated
the categories of race from
simple, permanent binaries,
Elizabeth Cohen has done
something similar with her own
path-breaking work about the
categories of citizenship.
So, it's my delight and
pleasure to turn it over
to Elizabeth.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thanks very much, Grant.
And I wanna thank everybody
for coming out today
to participate in this, am I too quiet?
I was happy I didn't trip on the way down.
Is that better?
Okay.
(Elizabeth laughs)
Yeah, thanks very much,
especially to the parents
who took time away from
catching up with their kids
to come out for the talk today.
Like Grant, I have noticed that people
are kind of compulsively talking
about the election lately,
and at this point in the
campaign, it's pretty unavoidable,
but underlying the Clinton-Trump race
are pretty complicated
questions of social class,
gender, and race that
will remain relevant,
even after the votes are tallied.
And with that in mind, I
think we're very fortunate
to have with us today an astute analyst
of identity in many of its
most salient incarnations.
Aliya Saperstein is Assistant
Professor of Sociology
at Stanford University.
She received her BA from
the University of Washington
and her PhD from the University
of California at Berkeley
where she trained as both a
sociologist and a demographer.
For those of us who bemoan
the Balkanization of social
sciences and the reinvention
of the wheel that goes on
within different disciplines,
Professor Saperstein's work
is a reminder that one
does not have to accept
the confining boundaries of
a single disciplinary home.
This is especially welcome news
here at the Maxwell School.
Indeed, there's been an
eager audience for her work
in an impressive array of venues.
Professor Saperstein has
published in many of the top
sociology, demography, and
social science journals.
She's also completing work on
a book that will be published
next year by the Russell
Sage Foundation Press.
Her articles have garnered awards
from the American
Sociological Association,
the Society for the
Study of Social Problems,
and the Population
Association, and she also
recently won the Population Association
of America's Early Achievement Award.
Dr. Saperstein has held
fellowship at the Russell Sage
Foundation, where we met,
at Stanford University,
and she's about to depart
for a residential fellowship
at Sciences Po in Paris, France.
She also regularly consults,
(Elizabeth laughs)
and I'm gonna be in her luggage.
She regularly consults
for the Pew Foundation,
the Census Bureau, and the
National Institute for Health,
among other organizations.
In the future, when you
fill out your census form
or answer a survey question
about your identity,
chances are good that you
will be seeing the product
of Dr. Saperstein's work.
That's pretty impressive,
but I think everyone
in the room will agree with me when I say
that Professor Saperstein's
crowning achievement,
the thing that we're all
completely jealous of,
is the fact that her
research caught the eye
of Stephen Colbert, who
designed an entire segment
around her work on race
and racial identification
not too long ago.
Academics may sit around
counting our journal articles
and citing our books, but
at the end of the day,
what we truly long for is to
become a point of fascination
for clever late-night
political commentary.
Really, what could be better
than having Stephen Colbert
turn to you to answer the question,
how racist a country are
we, which is what he asked.
I'm not sure that Dr.
Saperstein wants to claim
she has an answer to
that particular question,
but I don't know she's
amassed a trove of data
and analysis that she can
share with us to help us decide
what we think the answer is.
So, I'll turn things over
to Dr. Saperstein shortly
to get our discussion of
racial mobility started.
Just a quick note on
procedure before we do.
We're departing from
our traditional format
ever so slightly today.
Dr. Saperstein's gonna speak
for about 40 to 50 minutes.
Then we're gonna go
directly to Q&A to allow
as much time as possible for everyone
to engage with her research
and its implications,
and afterwards, as Grant
said, we hope you will join us
in the atrium right
outside for a reception
where we can continue the conversation.
So, please join me in
welcoming Aliya Saperstein
to the Maxwell School.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you, Grant and Elizabeth,
and for everyone here
for coming to this talk.
I really look forward to
sharing this work with you
and to hearing your
thoughts after I finish.
So, what is race?
I want you to pause for just a minute
before I start telling you what I think.
(Aliya laughs)
And think about how you
would answer this question.
What is race?
It's a big, abstract,
potentially kind of scary
and uncomfortable question.
So let's try to make it
a little more concrete.
What is your race,
and how do you know?
I ask this question to my students
on the first day of class,
and then I ask them again
on the last day of class,
just to see if they still
think the same thing.
(Elizabeth laughs)
So you can ask yourself
this question again
once we finish this evening.
So, because I can't hear your answers,
it would take all of the time to go around
and have you answer the
question, what is your race
and how do you know, I'll just tell you
that the most common response
in the United States, anyway,
is that we, as individuals,
inherit our race from our parents.
We are what we are because
of what our parents were
before us, and what their
parents were before them,
and what their parents were
before them, and so on.
We might start by
thinking about skin color.
We might use the word culture,
but when push comes to shove,
Americans tend to define race in ancestry.
This makes race what
sociologists would call
an ascribed characteristic.
Now, often, people use the word ascribed
to mean someone else has
ascribed something to you,
and we will be talking about
that for most of this evening.
But, the technical definition of ascribed,
in the way that sociologists use it,
is that it means the
characteristic is fixed,
in this case, at birth, and
it's out of your control.
You didn't get to choose
who your parents were,
and therefore, you don't get
to choose what your race is.
So if race is an ascribed characteristic,
this is the assumption that we're making
about how it operated in our lives.
We make a little bit of an
exception if your ancestry
comes from what we think of
is multiple racial groups.
In that case, we might think, well, okay,
we'll let you choose which one
or more of those ancestries
you identify with.
So, for example, when Barack
Obama answered the census
in 2010, and in 2000, and
probably every decade before that,
he identified only as black,
even though, as we know,
he has one parent who probably
identified herself as white
and one parent who would probably
identify himself as black.
So, we think of him as
choosing to identify as black,
but he's really the races
that he inherited from his parents.
So let's talk about the
census for a minute,
partly since Elizabeth brought it up,
and since this is an
exercise that hopefully
everyone in this room has
or will soon take part in.
This is an example,
you may not be able to see it in the back,
but this is an example of
the census form from 2010.
We like to think of this, many
of us like to think of this,
as a question that's easy
and obvious to answer.
Is person number one of Hispanic,
Latino, or Spanish origin?
What is person number one's race?
If we think of this as obvious,
some of us may not even read the question.
We may just see the boxes
and know automatically,
ah, this is the box that I check.
Every time I see this
form, this is what I put.
I know what you wanna know.
I don't even really think about it.
Other people are more confused
by this series of questions,
and are wondering, which
box am I supposed to check?
There aren't very many
instructions on the form itself.
They simply say, please
answer both question eight
about Hispanic origin and
question nine about race.
For this census, Hispanic
origins are not races.
Okay.
What does that mean?
So which criteria are we supposed to use
when we choose these categories?
The categories themselves don't give us,
they give us a kind of range of hints
for what we're supposed to use.
The categories white and
black suggest we're supposed
to use color, but not all the
categories reference colors.
Other categories, like the
one for American Indian,
for example, suggest that
we should use some kind
of group affiliation, like
being enrolled in a tribe.
Other categories suggest we
should use national origin,
like Japanese or Chinese,
Filipino, Vietnamese.
If you read carefully, they do provide
more detailed instructions,
not on the form itself.
But if you look at the
detailed instructions,
the census actually tells you to use
what we might think of
as long-ago ancestry.
So they define the white
category as people whose,
the wording is so strange,
but, you are white
if your ancestors are among
the original people of Europe,
the Middle East, and North Africa.
You are black if your ancestors
are among the original people of Africa.
That gets kind of tricky.
How far back are we
talking about when we say
my ancestors are from the
original people of Africa?
The geneticists would tell
us we're all from Africa.
Shouldn't we all check the
black or African-American box?
We know Rachel Dolezal
got in a lot of trouble
for doing just that for just that reason.
So, our instructions say
to use long-ago ancestry,
but we don't have agreement
about how far back
we are actually supposed to go
to decide which box is ours.
So I'm just gonna keep
piling on the questions,
(Aliya laughs)
and hopefully, eventually,
we'll start getting to some answers.
But even aside from those
questions, there are other
questions that I've always
wanted to know about race.
What if we don't assume
that race is not fixed,
that race is fixed at birth?
Some of those criteria
that I just talked about change over time.
Your color depends on how much
time you spend in the sun.
Your national origin can't
change, but your nationality can.
So what happens when you move
from one country to the other?
Your long-ago ancestry can't change,
but your group affiliation might.
So, if someone of these criteria change,
maybe race can change.
If that's the case, then that
leads to another question.
When race is fluid, do
the changes that we see
in the way people identify
or in how other people
might categorize them, do
they blur the boundaries
between racial groups and
break down those distinctions?
So does fluidity kind of
make race less meaningful,
because people can belong
to multiple groups at
different points in time,
or do the changes that we
see in racial identification
and how other people
see you actually reify
and reinforce those boundaries,
because we move people
for particular reasons, so
those movements are not random.
If they're patterned, we might
not be breaking down race
simply by letting it change over time.
But let's start with the first question.
Why might we think that
race isn't fixed at birth?
Why is that some criteria
might change over time
and thus the meaning of race
and how we apply it to people
might change over time?
So, there's a literature on what we call
the race as a social construction.
And this research tells us
that we really can't take
racial divisions for granted.
Just because those forms
appear on the census in 2010,
just because those boxes appear
on the census form in 2010,
does not mean those same
boxes will appear in 2020
or 2030 or 2040, and we
know those same boxes
did not appear in 1790 or 1850 or 1900.
So, the names and the
numbers of categories
associated with race do change over time.
The relative rankings of the group,
who we think of as on top or doing well,
and who we think of as on
the bottom and doing poorly,
can also change over time.
But most of all, the rules
for determining who belongs
change over time.
Most of the time, we don't
even articulate those rules.
We have, sometimes we have
formal rules, like the one-drop
rule that tell us who belongs
in one category or another,
but often, our rules are more informal.
Is Latino an ethnicity or a
race, and what does that mean?
We don't have a formal rule for that.
We have a bunch of
informal rules for that,
and those change over time as well.
But when we think about
the names and the numbers
of categories changing and
ideas about who belongs
in one group or another
changing, we tend to think
of those changes as affecting groups.
So some of you who've taken
race classes may be familiar
with the idea of the Irish becoming white.
We have this sense that the
Irish were once a denigrated
immigrant population that
was seen as not-quite white.
They were often living in neighborhoods
with African-Americans.
They were often working in the same jobs.
Many of them intermarried.
Because they had low class status,
they were seen as less than white.
Over time, as their prospects
improved in the country,
as they moved more into the middle class,
suddenly, yeah, you can be white.
So we have this idea
that groups can shift.
The one-drop rule also is a
story of what social scientists
call our boundaries shifting.
So you can think of like a Venn diagram.
Imagine a bunch of circles.
Sometimes, they overlap.
They expand and they contract.
So when a boundary shifts, a group expands
to include the Irish, for example.
The one drop rule, the
boundary of whiteness shrinks
to exclude people who
have African ancestry,
and simultaneously, the
boundary around blackness
expands to include those
people who may not previously
have been seen as or thought
of themselves as black.
So, as social scientist, we tend to think
of these group boundaries
changing over time,
but the individuals themselves,
nothing is changing about their race.
So this is a political historical change,
but in my own life, race is fixed.
So, the individual version,
if boundaries can shift,
expand, and contract,
the individual version
is often called boundary crossing.
So I actually move from
one category to another
by crossing the boundary of that category.
We think of this as pretty rare.
It's an exception to the
rule of the way that race
is supposed to work in the United States,
and as in the case of Rachel
Dolezal, we often think
of people who do this as
kind of crazy and weird.
But if we take this out
of the realm of theory
and we look at our empirical data,
if we stop assuming that race is fixed
and we start looking at how it's measured
at different points of
time, we actually find out,
it's not that weird.
So, for example, in 1992,
a number of demographers discovered
that babies who die in
their first year of life
can be racially classified differently
on their birth and
their death certificate.
We measure their race in
their birth certificate.
We measure it again in
their death certificate,
and they don't always agree,
even when the baby has
only lived for one year,
and the baby clearly
couldn't classify itself.
We also know from other research
that self-identification can change
over time and across contexts.
People identify differently
when they're at school
than when they're at home, for example.
And lastly, we know that
people's self-identification
does not necessarily match the way
that other people perceive them,
or how they think other
people classify them.
We can think of those as three
different dimensions of race,
self-identification, how
other people see you,
and what sociologists and
social psychologists call
a reflected appraisal, how you
think other people see you.
All of these may not match.
They don't need to match,
because we draw on different criteria.
How I identify myself may
not be how you perceive me.
So, once we start letting go of this idea
that race is fixed and that
the assignment to categories
is obvious, we start
seeing really interesting
patterns in what's going on.
So let's take that second question.
People are changing.
Can we predict why they're changing
in the particular ways that we are?
Do we have any expectations
for why they might go
in particular directions at
particular points in time?
Here I think it's really
important to think about research
on the social construction
of race that emphasizes
that racial divisions are
created and maintained
through struggles over resources
and rewards in society.
Race was never a neutral
recognition of difference.
It was not like, oh,
yay, some of us are brown
and some of us are black
and some of us are white
and some of us are yellow.
It was, some of us are better than others,
and we need a way to talk about that.
Thus, we might expect
that when people change
racial categories over time
or when the way they identify
differs from how someone
else perceives them,
then those differences and those changes
might be related to social
status, to where they fit
in the social hierarchy
at a given point in time.
You might be thinking about passing,
the idea that someone who is really black
based on their ancestry
might pass as white
because they appear white.
This would be an example
of what I called before boundary crossing.
The boundary, the
categories didn't change.
The way we think about white
and black didn't change,
but because their appearance is different
than their ancestry, they might be able
to cross over that boundary
between blackness and whiteness.
The association with status
in that case is that usually,
people did that to try
to get a better job,
to try to live in a better neighborhood,
to try to be paid better
for doing the same job
that someone else who was
classified as white already got.
So, in this case, they change race
in order to improve their status.
We might also think that changes in race
work in the other direction.
In Brazil, for example, there's
a phrase, money whitens.
That suggests the opposite,
that once you succeed, once your
status improves, you are more
likely to either identify
or be perceived and
treated by others as white.
So this suggests that when race changes,
social status might change too.
So, let's find out if that's true.
If we think race is fixed,
that question is crazy.
'Cause it shouldn't change, so
why would we even look at it?
But we're gonna assume race is not fixed,
and thus this question
becomes worthy to ask.
So there is a catch.
When you want to measure
race changing over time,
in a society that tends
to think of it as fixed,
there's really no reason to
measure it more than once.
If I think it's fixed, why
do I need to keep asking you?
That would be silly.
You're just gonna give me the
same answer over and over.
So, typically, we only ask
people how they identify
again when we've changed the question.
So the only reason to
ask someone their race
again and again and again is if we now
think we need a new category,
or, like, at the time of the 2000 census
when we decided, oh, you
can mark more than one.
So now we need to ask
you again to find out.
Before we only let you mark one.
Now we need to ask you again to find out
how you answer when we let
you pick more than one.
So, for this reason,
we don't actually have
a lot of good data on how people change
their self-identification over time
without the questions also changing,
which makes it difficult to separate,
well, is the question just changing,
or is their race actually changing?
Is there something different about the way
that race impacts their
life that has changed,
or did you just change
the question, right?
So, for this reason,
I'm gonna focus mostly
on interviewer classification,
how somebody else perceives you.
Because oddly enough, when
we have recorded this,
we have done so without
changing the question,
which means we can isolate
real, hopefully, racial change
from changing the question.
Ooh, that may be too small for
you guys to read in the back,
though I will do my best to
describe what you're looking at.
So, what I'm gonna show you
is drawn from survey data.
So imagine a survey
interviewer comes to your house
and asks you a whole bunch of questions
over the course of about an hour or so,
and at the end of this interview,
the survey interviewer is
gonna go back to their car
or their house, and then
they have a little bit more
information that they need to
fill out about the interview.
This is called the
interviewer remarks section
of the survey, and what
you're seeing up there,
for those of you who can actually see it,
is a page from that
interviewer remarks section.
And what you can see is
that one of the things
that the interviewer
was asked to do in this
particular survey was to mark
the race of the respondent.
They were given, as you
can see, no instructions.
They were simply given the categories
white, black, and other, and
remember, they're marking them
after they've already
talked to this person,
and probably spent about
an hour in their home.
So this particular survey,
the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,
it started in 1979, and it
continues to be collected today.
From 1979 until 1998, the interviewers
did this after every interview
for every single person they interviewed.
There's about 12,686 people in the survey.
Many of them were
interviewed every single year
between 1979 and 1998, which means we have
up to 17 racial classifications
of the same person
recorded by the interviewer over time.
So, this is what some
of the data looks like.
Each of these letters represents a year
in the life of the person.
So a W means that in that particular year,
they were seen as white; a B means
that in that particular year
they were seen as black;
and an O means in that particular year,
they were seen as other.
So, this table shows you
examples of different kinds
of what I would call racial trajectories.
What are the patterns
in their racial classification over time?
The most common pattern
is to not change at all,
and the most common
pattern among the people
who don't change is to
be classified as white
17 times by the interviewer.
Those are the people in
the top row in this table.
Everyone else in this table
has experienced at least
one change in how they
were classified over time.
But what I hope you
notice, so, these are not
the only people who changed
in the survey, right?
These are just examples.
When there's only one change, what was
the most common pattern
for that one change?
When there were two
changes, or discrepancies,
I should say, what was
the most common pattern
of having two discrepancies?
I could give you different
examples of each of these,
so for number four, you see
that an example of having
four discrepant classifications
is being classified as white
in each of the first
four years of the survey
and as other in all of
the rest of the survey.
But that's not the only
pattern for people who had four
discrepant classifications.
Some of them look like
some of the other examples
where there's a year here or
there, or, like the person
in number 10, they might
bounce around a lot
across all of the different categories,
going back and forth over time.
Now, some of you might be thinking, well,
some people are just gonna
be more likely to change,
because they're difficult to fit
in this really simple scheme
of white, black, and other.
There's a lot of categories
that are left out of this scheme,
and I'd have a hard time sticking
most people in it, right?
But if that's the case, everyone
should look like number 10.
Everyone should be bouncing back and forth
among these categories,
if it's just really hard
to figure out which one is the right one.
If there are particular
things, particular criteria
that we're relying on, to
classify someone in a given
category and to change them
from one category to another,
that's more likely to produce
some of the other patterns that we see.
And so that's the question
that I set out to answer in my research.
How is it, why is it that in
one year, you were classified
as white, and the next year,
you were classified as other?
Did something else change
that might be related to that change?
So, in this chart, we
take, instead of one person
across all of those
years, we take one year
and take all of the
people who were classified
as either black or other, and we ask,
if we take all of those people
and we follow them forward
one year in time, what proportion of them,
what percent of them, will
switch to white in the next year?
So, on average, the
dashed line here tells you
that on average in the survey,
people switched from either
black or other to white
nine percent of the time.
But I'm interested in,
what explains departures
from that average?
So if the average captures ambiguity,
what captures, what helps us predict
when that change is more or less likely?
So, the categories along the bottom
are changes in social status.
Did you move to the suburbs
from that first year to the second year?
Did you graduate from college
from that first year to the second year?
How about, did you get married?
If you did any of those things
in the intervening year,
you were significantly more
likely to be classified
as white, to change from not
white to white in the same year
that you changed from
not suburbs to suburbs
or from not a college graduate
to a college graduate.
So, this suggests that upward mobility
when good things happen to
you, it increases the odds
that you will be classified
by someone else as white.
So, what about predicting what changes,
what makes people change to black?
What makes it that an
interviewer is more likely
to see you as black than they
did in the previous year?
So now, we're looking at all
the people who were not black,
all of the people who were
classified as white or other
in a given year, and we're
looking at what proportion
of them changed or the interviewer changed
their classification to black.
One thing you should
notice, for those of you
who can see the Y axis,
the Y axis here is 18%,
and our average change was nine.
Change from not black to black
is an order of magnitude less likely.
So our Y axis only goes
to 1.8%, and on average,
only about .7% of all
the people in the survey
changed from not black
to black in a given year.
One way of interpreting this is that
black classification is stickier.
Once you are classified as
black, you are more likely
to be classified as black
continuing on into the future,
all else being equal.
So what if all else is not equal?
What about when things
change in your life?
What if you became an unmarried parent,
either because you had
a child out of wedlock,
or you got divorced from
one year to the next?
What if you lost your job?
What if you suddenly have your income
drop below the poverty line?
It'd never been below
the poverty line before.
All of those changes, which are
all negative status changes,
make it more likely that you're seen
as black in the following year,
and when good things
happen, you are less likely
to be seen as black in the following year.
So that means the reverse of what we saw
in the previous slide is also true.
So not only does upward
mobility make the odds
of you being seen as white
more likely; downward mobility
makes the odds of you being
seen as black more likely.
So, for those of you
who are into statistics,
what I just showed you is all descriptive.
I just used sample restrictions
to isolate the people
who were most interested in,
looking at their changes.
I can assure you that we have
done a lot of statistical
modeling to try to
control for other factors
that might matter, including things
like whether they
self-identified as Latino,
whether they self-identified
as multi-racial,
and the characteristics
of the interviewer,
so the age, self-identified
race, gender, and education
of the interviewer can also be
controlled for in this data.
I'm happy to answer more
questions about this,
but I just wanna reassure you that
although I'm showing you
descriptive statistics,
we have controlled for
these factors as best we can
in statistical modeling.
All right, so, there's
one thing from this data
that we could not control
for, because the survey
did not record the
respondent's appearance.
We don't know their skin tone.
We don't know their hair texture.
We don't know their facial features.
If you think that those
things are driving the changes
that we see, we're gonna need
to do more to convince you
that what's really happening
is about social status
and not about those other characteristics.
So, to try to address that question,
my colleagues and I teamed up
with some social psychologists
to run an experiment.
This is a computer screen
that our subjects were shown,
and they were asked,
they were shown a face,
and they were asked to
racially classify it
by either marking, clicking
the black box or the white box.
We varied the faces
along what psychologists
would call a morph continuum.
These are computer-generated faces,
and we took a stereotypical white face
and a stereotypical black
face and then morphed them
so that we could control how the skin tone
and other features were
changing across the spectrum.
This way, we could have
faces with the exact same
characteristics but vary, in this case,
whether they were wearing a suit
or whether they were
wearing janitor's coveralls.
This was our attempt to capture
a difference in social status.
So, if our survey results were true,
we would expect that the faces in the suit
would be more likely to be seen as white,
because white is associated
with high status,
and the faces in the janitor
coveralls would be less likely
to be seen as white and
maybe more likely to be seen
as black, because janitor coveralls
are associated with lower status.
So this is what we were
testing in the experiment.
Indeed, so, well, before I get to that,
(Aliya laughs)
I will tell you that I wouldn't
be here telling you this
if it didn't work out exactly
the way that we expected,
that when we showed the
exact same face in a suit,
they were more likely to
classify that face as white
and less likely to classify it as black,
even when we held the phenotypic
characteristics equal.
Now, that happens most often
in the middle of the spectrum,
when the faces were the most
what we might call ambiguous.
So that's when we could see people,
oh, I'm not sure, so I'm gonna lean
towards the suit and
make them white, right?
So you can imagine, this
happened more at the middle
of the spectrum than at the
poles, where at the poles,
it's more obvious what race
the person is supposed to be.
So, we also, we didn't just
record how they classified them
using those boxes at
the top of the screen.
We also recorded their mouse
trajectory as they moved
towards the boxes,
either up and to the left
or up and to the right,
and we were interested in,
we told them to start moving
that mouse before they decided.
They were prompted
about this all the time.
Move quickly, before you've decided.
And this is what we see.
Even when they classify, so
these are the same faces,
one in the suit, one in
the janitor's coveralls,
even when they classify the
face in the janitor's coveralls
as white, their mouse trajectory veers
ever so slightly closer
to the black category
before they end up in the white category.
Now, this is the average
mouse trajectories
across all of the participants,
so you can imagine,
some might be like.
(Aliya laughs)
Like, some of it.
This is averaging all
of those trajectories.
But on average, people are
a little bit more likely
to think black when they see
someone in janitor's coveralls,
even if they have the same face
as someone they've seen in a suit.
Okay, I've been talking a
lot about black and white,
and that doesn't fit
the people in this room,
let alone the people in this country.
We don't have as good data, unfortunately,
on how this pattern might look
if we have more categories.
So, this is gonna be a
lot more speculative.
This is from the National
Longitudinal Study
of Adolescent to Adult Health.
They just changed the name.
(Aliya laughs)
So, we just call it AdHealth.
So, this is from the AdHealth survey,
and this is just one year of data,
or two years of data.
So it changed from wave
three of the survey,
which was recorded in
about 2001, to a change
in wave four of the survey,
which was recorded in 2007.
So, imagine, you're
surveyed, six years go by,
you're surveyed again.
That's the data that we're looking at.
And in this survey, we have
more racial categories.
We don't just have
white, black, and other.
We have white, black, American
Indian and Alaska Native,
and Asian or Pacific Islander.
So we can see, when we
have more categories,
do we get the same result?
Do we still see people's
classifications changing
in line with our stereotypes
about people's social status?
So, what I'm showing you
here, these are all the men
in the survey, and the
reason we limit this to men
is because sadly, they are more likely
to come into contact with
the criminal justice system.
And the people in this
survey are all young adults,
and so they are at prime
age for coming in contact
with the criminal justice system.
So we wanted to know, if
we take all the people
who had never been arrested in wave three
and we look at their race
in wave three according
to the interviewer, and then
we follow them to wave four,
some of those people
experience their first arrest
in between wave three and wave four.
And then we know how the interviewer
classified them in wave four.
So we can look at whether having contact
with the criminal justice system
made it more or less likely
that the interviewer would
see these men differently.
What I'm showing you, so,
this chart shows Asian,
white, American Indian, and black.
These are the categories
that the interviewer
had to choose from, and we're asking,
what are the odds that,
all else being equal,
a young man would be seen as Asian, white,
American Indian, or
black if he were arrested
in between those two surveys.
And the pattern that you can see
is that for Asian and
white, you were less likely
to be seen as Asian in wave
four if you'd been arrested,
even if you were seen as Asian previously.
You are less likely to be
seen as white in wave four,
even if you'd been seen
as white previously.
But American Indian and
black, if you were arrested,
you were more likely to
be seen as American Indian
and more likely to be seen as black
in the next wave of the survey.
Unfortunately, this kind of
fits our stereotypes too.
We think about Asians as a model minority
and therefore think, they're probably not
gonna break the rules and get arrested.
That's not an Asian thing to do.
American Indians, our
stereotypes about them are
complicated, but probably
for the most part, we think
of them as kind of lazy and
criminal in a stereotypical way.
And it appears that that fits
with the way the interviewers saw them.
So, let's unpack just a little bit
how those results came about.
So in the first column on the left,
you can see how the
young man was classified
by the interviewer in wave three.
In the second column, you can
see how that same young man
was classified in wave four.
Then we break out whether
you were arrested or not,
and we look at the difference.
So, if you were classified
as Asian in wave three,
you were significantly
less likely to stay Asian
according to the interviewer.
Interestingly, you're
significantly more likely
to be classified as white, which suggests
that we think of whites
as somehow more criminal,
more lawbreaking than
Asians, which I kind of like.
(Aliya laughs)
You're more likely to be
seen as American Indian
if you are arrested in
between the two surveys,
and not very many people
in the survey changed
from Asian to black, so we
can't really measure that
as a significant difference,
one way or the other.
Then at the bottom, we
can look at the people
who started out as American
Indian in wave three
and look at how their race changed
related to whether or
not they were arrested.
And what we see is they're less
likely to be seen as Asian.
They're less likely, significantly so,
to be seen as white, which
fits that racial hierarchy
that we saw in the previous slide.
If we don't associate your
category with criminality,
we don't change your
classification when you come
into contact with the
criminal justice system,
but if you did get arrested
in between those two surveys,
you were more likely to be
classified as American Indian
again, and you were more likely
to be classified as black,
so that where people are
funneled fits our stereotypes.
They're not moving randomly
across all categories.
Oops, I'm not sure what that box is.
Hopefully it will go away?
No, hmm.
Okay, well, what it's blocking
is the label at the top
that says that the
darker color marks those
that are arrested, and the lighter color
marks those that are not arrested.
So, as I close, what I want to make sure,
I don't want you to leave this room
thinking that racial fluidity.
- Let me get that for you.
- Thank you.
What I don't want you to
think is that racial fluidity
is the only thing that
drives this pattern.
So it is not just the people who change
that create this association
between blackness and crime,
American Indianness and crime,
Asianness and not crime,
whiteness and not crime.
It's important to break
down who's leaving,
who's staying, and who's
joining the categories.
So this isn't just about fluidity.
It's also about stability.
Remember, I told you black
classification is more stable
over time than white classification.
So we don't wanna focus
only on who's moving.
We also wanna focus on who's
staying in the same category.
So, first, we'll look at who joins.
So we've got our categories,
black on the left
and Asian on the right.
You're more likely to
join the category black,
according to the interviewer,
if you were arrested.
It's a small difference.
Three percent of the people in the survey
who were not black will
be classified as black
by the interviewer in the next wave,
but it's statistically
significantly different
than the next bar over, the
people who were classified
as not black and were not arrested.
They do not join the black category.
People who were not classified as Asian
and were not arrested
are more likely to join
the category Asian than the people
who were not classified
as Asian and arrested.
I know this is complicated,
but bear with me.
There's people moving and
staying all over the place.
So who leaves?
That's who enters the categories.
Who leaves the categories?
So, if we look at who starts out as Asian,
if they're arrested, they're
less likely to be Asian.
They're drawn out of the Asian category.
If you're previously classified
as black and you're not
arrested, you're more likely
to leave the black category.
It's a small effect, but it's
statistically significant.
So, who stays in the category?
If you were previously
categorized as black
and you're arrested, you are more likely
to stay classified as black.
You stay in the black category.
If you were previously
classified as Asian,
and you were not arrested,
you're more likely to stay
in the Asian category.
So, by drawing people
out, moving people in,
and keeping some people in the categories,
we reinforce the association
between blackness
and crime and Asianness and not crime.
So this is why I think it's important
that we take what I call a
racial mobility perspective,
that we stop thinking that race is fixed,
and that we stop thinking
that the only thing
that assigns people to a category
is their physical appearance
or their ancestry.
We cannot see the patterns
that I just showed you
if we continue to assume those
things, that race is fixed
and that it's assigned at birth.
I also think it's important
to realize, or, let me,
I think a lot of people think
that if we focus on the idea
of race as a social construction,
that it distracts us
from the aspects of racial
inequality that really matter,
that if we make race too
complex, we're drawing
our attention away from the
things that we care about.
I'm gonna argue based on this
evidence that that's not true,
that when we pay attention to
race as a social construction
and the fact that these
categories are not fixed
and that we assign people
to them and we put ourselves
in them every day, that
that's part of the story
of racial inequality in this country,
and that when we pay
attention to these patterns
of racial classification,
it puts a focus on one
of the mechanisms that
maintains racial inequality.
Our ideas about who is black,
our ideas about who is white,
our ideas about who is
Asian, are not changing.
We simply reassign the people
to better fit our stereotypes
of the categories.
This probably simply reifies
our ideas of racial difference.
It leads us to believe
that blacks are different
from Asians and whites
and American Indians.
Our data simply reinforces that.
We're less likely to see
those cases that don't fit
our stereotypes, because
we've reclassified the people
to fit the story that we already believe.
So what do we do with this information,
other than be very depressed?
(Aliya laughs)
This is what happens to me
pretty much every time I talk about this.
Sociologists are always telling us
what all the problems are.
(Aliya laughs)
So, what do we do with this information?
I think it's helpful to
remember that the reason
we collect data on race and
ethnicity in this country
is in order to monitor disparities
and to enforce
anti-discrimination legislation.
So, we should ask ourselves,
we should keep that in mind
when we ask ourselves what we should do,
when changes in racial categorization,
whether people choose them for themselves
or assign them to other
people, appear to cement
racial inequality rather
than alleviate it.
Is this a problem with our data?
Is this a problem with our society?
And how do we fix both?
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- We have two bearers of the microphones,
and so two mics will go out at a time.
If you guys just wanna raise your hands,
I'll send Grant and Eric
over, and you guys can
send some questions Aliya's way.
So, Eric.
- Super interesting talk.
- The microphone's not on.
- So, thank you for such an
interesting presentation,
particularly because I think
I don't even classify myself
as a Hispanic if you were to ask me,
but I guess my question to you
comes from the last comment
you made about the reason
why we collect race
is because we want to make sure
there is no discrimination,
but from the data that
you presented, it appears
that discrimination is
not on the basis of race;
it's on the basis of status,
and maybe what we have to be looking for
is actually status discrimination
as opposed to race.
- So, that's a great question.
I think that's certainly true.
I think we can discriminate
against people for both of those
reasons, sometimes simultaneously,
sometimes separately.
I think one of the things
that's challenging,
I didn't show you information
about self-identification,
but one of the things that
we know as best we can,
given that the measures
tend to change over time,
but one of the things
that we think we know
is that people change
their self-identification
when they experience discrimination.
So, if I, let's say I
identified as Latino,
and some time from that point
when I identified as Latino,
I felt like I was discriminated against,
I'm probably more likely to
stay identifying as Latino,
because I felt discriminated against.
Now, this gets a little bit
complicated, because it depends
on who I thought discriminated against me.
Was it Latinos?
Was it blacks?
Was it whites?
Right, if it's Latinos who I
felt discriminated against me,
I'm actually less likely
to identify as Latino.
If I thought it was whites
who discriminated against me,
I might go in a couple
different directions.
I might identify as white in the hopes
of escaping that discrimination,
that if I just act
more like you, maybe
you'll leave me alone.
On the other hand, I might
be reinforced in my identity
as Latino, because you've
told me that I'm different,
and that you're gonna treat
me differently, right?
So I think, in that sense,
that complicates the story
a little bit.
So we know, my data
suggests that other people
will put you in a different
category if your status changes,
but we put ourselves into categories
when our status changes, and sometimes,
it's in the same directions,
and sometimes it's not.
And I think, I think that's
part of the challenge.
All of these things are
moving, and if we capture them
all as stable, we're not
getting the full picture.
So, I don't have an answer
for you necessarily,
but I think we need to
think about the problem
in a more complex way
than we currently do,
because we miss these
dynamics when we do that.
- [Audience Member] The mic's upside down.
- [Audience Member] I asked if it was on,
but it's upside-down.
So I asked the wrong question.
- It is a weird one.
(Aliya laughs)
- Thank you, that was a
really interesting talk.
I wanted to ask you about the impact
that you see of some of your findings
on policies like Affirmative Action.
So just sticking with how
others identify the race
in an individual, so, at least
the official justifications
for Affirmative Action is that it promotes
cross-racial understanding
within the classroom,
and so the educational benefit
is that we work on these
very stereotypes that your
data shows are invariant.
So, would it be fair to
say that an inference
from your findings is
that Affirmative Action,
because it provides access
for underserved minorities
to elite institutions, doesn't actually do
what it's advertised to do,
which is work on stereotypes,
but rather just identifies
a subset of the population
that's transferred or identified
to another racial group
so that there's a movement
of a specific population
from one racial group to
another, but stereotypes don't
actually get reworked at all
through Affirmative Action?
Is that a fair and depressing
inference from your...
- Yes.
(Aliya laughs)
Yes, I think that is one
fair and depressing inference
from this information, because if the goal
of Affirmative Action is to
take people and give them
upward mobility, but that
that very upward mobility
makes them seem less like
the category they came from,
that helped them as an individual,
hopefully, in achieving upward mobility,
but it did not help us
break down our stereotypes.
I think in that sense,
I do not have a cure for
Affirmative Action policy,
in case any of you were wondering.
But I do think that it's helpful to make
that distinction between
people's racial origins
and their racial destinations.
So your racial origins are that race
that you were born into.
Your racial destinations may or may not
be the same category
that you were born into.
So, do we want Affirmative Action to work
on your racial origin, or
on your racial destination,
because of course, and this
is one of the most contentious
aspects of Affirmative Action, actually,
not what you described, but
that I can report whatever
I want and try to qualify
for Affirmative Action.
And so if what I'm asking
is your self identity,
that could be your racial destination,
where you are currently
at this point in time,
and not your racial origin,
the accumulated disadvantage
from a particular category
that I thought I was trying to remedy.
- So, I have a question that
maybe shifts the conversation
a little bit, and I don't know if this is
in a superficial direction,
or it's something important.
But I was listening to you and thinking
about boundary crossing
and how that might relate
to elective DNA testing
for ancestral origin,
and I would love to hear you reflect on,
why is scientific verification necessary?
What are people buying, why
are they buying into this,
and for what are they searching,
and might this be related
to a growing awareness
of the social construction
of race and racial mobility?
So, that's my question.
- It's a great question
and a complicated one,
and there's many parts to
it, and I will probably
ignore many of them in my answer,
so I apologize but, you know, keep asking,
(Aliya laughs)
keep asking the questions.
I think genetic ancestry
testing and what it's doing
to our conceptions of
ourselves and each other
are an incredibly
important topic right now,
and I think we've only just begun asking
the questions that you've just asked.
So what I'm gonna tell you is
not at all, like, the answer.
But I think it's, I think
it is important to ask,
why do people feel it's
necessary to take that test,
because not everyone does.
Some of the research that I've
done and not yet published,
so, caveat, very preliminary,
suggests that people
are more likely to decline
a genetic ancestry test
if they're recent immigrants.
I don't, what do I, I don't need a test
to tell me where I'm from.
I just came from there, right?
So the people who take
genetic ancestry tests
tend to be the people who aren't sure
where their ancestors came
from, and they're hoping
that the test will give
them the answer to that.
But of course, we can fight
about what the test actually
shows, but what the test
purports to show is that
long-ago ancestry that we
talked about as one criteria
for why someone might pick
a racial or ethnic category.
So it tells you not how you
should think about yourself
now in this present moment,
but how you should think
about all the components
of your background.
So this could be really good.
If everyone took a genetic
ancestry test and realized
that we weren't all 100% of
that box that we keep checking,
that could be a good thing.
But, if we think that
the genetic ancestry test
gives us the right
answer, that's maybe not
such a good thing, because
it's not clear that the way
race operates in the world as a way
that people discriminate
against each other
is based on your long-ago
genetic ancestry.
I don't ask you to whip
our your 23andMe pie chart
before I deny you a job, right?
So I think we need to think
about when that information
is useful and when it's not,
and I think in some cases,
it could help us think about
race in more complicated ways
and think about ancestry
in more complicated ways,
but I think it sometimes oversimplifies
some of the things that we wanna know.
- [Audience Member] On that same topic.
- [Elizabeth] Please wait for
the, wait for the microphone.
- On that same topic of genetic interest,
I work in the field of
neurology a little bit, and over
the past 20 years, a hope
for optimism seems to exist,
because we always ask race on
our medical questionnaires.
And typically, older adults
will answer Caucasian,
white, black, Hispanic, and many Hispanics
will actually write
their country of origin.
I've noticed this where now,
getting information on people
that are coming in for
neurological diseases
that have a historical component,
the younger folks are
simply answering human.
And as simple as that sounds,
over a 20-year period,
I've observed lately,
you know, over the past
maybe seven to 10 years,
that about 30% of the people
are just simply not answering,
just simply putting human,
and of course in the exam
room, we have to say, well,
we really kind of need
to know more than human,
because we're looking for medical reasons.
But it's just interesting;
optimistically, it seems
that there is a real
undertow that's changing
to just that humanity, and I
see the implications of this,
you know, when you talk about
upwards mobility as whiteness,
downward mobility as blackness,
obviously, that's silly,
because maybe 10,000 years ago in Egypt,
being black in Egypt meant upwards,
and being white and Israeli
or Jewish meant being a slave.
So, it seems that behavior, your behavior,
your willingness to save
money to buy a home,
your willingness to get
a bachelor's degree,
really all these things, your
willingness to keep a job
and stay on the job and
all these white things
and black thing are bad, as
we say, upward and lower,
in reality, it's the behavior
that moves you up or down
in substance, and I think
if we're going to achieve
in education, in medicine, in anything,
to be, make meaningful
change in someone's life,
we have to focus on their
individual behavior,
and that, unfortunately,
has a racial connotation,
but in reality, the behavior
is what changes people's lives in reality.
The patient that stops smoking
feels better, and smoking
actually can be classified
as a poor white habit,
or poor black habit, or a simply
silly, stupid human habit.
I think we need to classify it as a latter
and focus on behavior
to create real change,
whether that be Affirmative
Action or in any other area.
But I noticed in the field of medicine,
if we focus on behavior that
actually works for success,
rather than these other
differences, it seems to help.
- So I think there's a
couple aspects to your,
that I think might be
helpful to think through.
One of them is, you're absolutely right.
At different countries,
different parts of the world,
at different places in time,
our hierarchies were different.
And we don't have data
on Egypt at that time,
but if we assume that the
same mechanisms are operating,
that we think about the people on the top
as being from a particular
category and the people
on the bottom as being
from a particular category,
I would expect the same
patterns, we would find
the same patterns, even if
they would be moving you
from a different name
of a category, right.
So, in that sense, I think
it is important to know
what the hierarchy is,
what the stereotypes are,
in a given context, because the results
will change depending on that.
It's not true that white
is always privileged
and black is always
marginalization and stigma,
but in our country, that is the history
that we have to grapple with.
But I think the other
aspect of what you said
is really interesting,
and I guess in some ways,
I would ask back, if it's behavior,
then why ask race on the
form in the medical office?
Why not just ask about
smoking and education
and all of those things, because
if race is not helping you
make that diagnosis, then you
don't need it on the form.
The only reason to have it
on the form is if you think
that their experience in this
country as a black person,
as an Asian person, as an
American Indian person,
is relevant to their diagnosis.
And I think, so, I think in that sense,
what my results suggest
is that it's not that,
it's both that black
people are more likely
statistically to be
unemployed in this country,
but it's also that having been unemployed,
regardless of your racial origin category,
you are more likely to be
seen as black substantively.
So it's not, in that sense, the behavior,
we're looking at people
who have the same behavior,
and they end up in a
different racial category
than they started in
because of our stereotypes.
So I think there's a
number of layers there
that we need to unpack.
What is if that we think contributes
to the neurological disease,
and should we be asking them
about that specifically?
If we think it's discrimination,
we should ask them,
were you discriminated against,
by whom,
(Aliya laughs)
and then maybe that will
help us interpret their
self-identification as a
particular category a bit better.
- Yeah, so, I actually
find, I find your framework
very interesting, having
grown up somewhere else.
The way that you're framing
the racial categorizations
really strikes me very much
similar to in the United Kingdom
they would really call class,
and, you know, in a very real sense,
you know, it seems very salient right now,
because certainly in terms of looking
at the current US elections,
someone had to bring it up,
and I'm gonna be the
person, but, you know,
I think, you know, within your framework,
we could perhaps understand, for example,
some of the people who are
supporting Trump in the sense
that, at least to me, it seems
like within your framework,
these are people, not
all of them, obviously,
but large numbers of
them are people who are,
phenotype-wise, you would
classify them as white,
but, in terms of your racial mobility,
the framework that you're creating,
these are people, they may
not realize explicitly,
but they feel themselves
essentially being reclassified,
because they are losing their status,
which they associated
in the past explicitly
with their skin color, but
now they see that those
privileges that they associated
with that phenotype, they're going away.
They don't really understand
it, but that's what they see.
So they are sliding down
the socioeconomic scale,
and that's where sort
of their, I don't know,
their outrage or whatever comes from.
- I think that's a great analysis.
I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna
move onto the next question.
So, I think, I think
you're absolutely right.
I think that part of what we see in this,
whether we wanna call them
Trump supporters or just people
who are, you know, regardless
of who they end up voting for,
people who are feeling
disaffected and who,
phenotypically, we
would classify as white,
I do think part of what's
going on is they're like,
wait, whiteness is privilege,
and I'm not feeling very
privileged right now.
And we can talk about
whether that's a fair thing
for them to think, whether
they are in fact still
relatively more privileged
than other people,
but I think it tells
us, again, it tells us
what we think about when
we think about white.
We think about white and
privilege, and that that's,
that those go together.
And in some ways, it could
be really interesting,
this would never happen, but
it would be really interesting
if people who think of themselves as white
decided to not identify
with the white category
when they felt like they
were no longer privileged.
That would be kind of cool.
(Aliya laughs)
Like, this is my symbol
that I no longer feel
like I am being treated as a
white person in this country.
Then, you know, they're
not doing that, though.
They're clinging to the idea
of whiteness as a privilege
that they deserve, that
they were born into,
and that should not go away,
and I think that's the idea
that we need to grapple with.
If we unpack that, no,
race is not a privilege
that you are born into,
that is not how we work
in this society, at least
not anymore, hopefully,
then I think maybe we can
get at some of those issues
as being not about race but about class.
- In terms of what you just
said, could we not think
about certain slurs like, for
example, some white people
being called rednecks,
essentially a way of trying to,
whether it's the people using
that slur or it's the people
themselves, but it's a way
of essentially separating
that identification away
from being white for people
who essentially being assessed
as not being worthy, right?
- I think that's one
way to think about it.
I mean, I think all of these terms tell us
about what we think white
means, and an opposite example,
Grant and I were talking
about this earlier today,
we also modify black.
We feel like we have to
say black middle class,
because black people are not middle class?
I need to specify that
I'm talking about, oh, no,
not, you know, blacks.
I'm talking about the black
middle class, you know, right?
So that tells us what we think
the category black means,
that we need to modify
it in particular ways,
and I think the same is
true, I think you're pointing
to a similar situation for whiteness.
- I'm wondering, what's your implications
of this piece of research,
especially with regards
to survey design, in terms
of collection of racial data?
I'm asking this in the context
of either federal agency
trying to alleviate or
reduce racial stereotypes
or in terms of employers
or even college admissions
officers with their specific
target sort of policy goals.
- Thanks, that's a great question.
So I think in some ways, there's two,
there's two different things
that we might be trying
to accomplish when we collect data.
So, I would suggest that
we collect measures of race
over time all the time, right?
Like, in the census, we do do that.
We do ask people to describe
themselves every decade,
but we only let very, very
limited numbers of research
actually use that data
where you can link it
and follow the people
and see, did they change
from 2000 to 2010 and so on.
So, we collect it, in
that sense, we collect
multiple measures of
race on the same people,
but we don't often use it
that way in our research.
And in the other kinds of
data that we often use,
we don't collect it multiple times.
So the first thing I would
ask is that we collect it
multiple times, that we
collect self-identification
over and over and over
again, ideally not changing
the question each time we
do that, so that we can see,
did you change the way you self-identify?
And the reason I think
that is useful is precisely
that it would get away from
this idea that your race
is fixed at birth and
is somehow responsible,
that your race is responsible
for your outcomes,
that it starts to trouble
that relationship.
So I think it's important for that reason,
that if we, if we no
longer see race as fixed,
we can't use race as the reason
for other people's behavior.
We have to look elsewhere for that.
So I think it's really
important, in that sense,
it's not a data collection reason so much
as a way that we describe
our results reason.
But I think for the purposes,
I think if the reason
we collect racial data is
to monitor discrimination,
then maybe we wanna
think about asking people
how they're seen by others.
Maybe we don't wanna know
your long-ago ancestry
or your current self-identification.
What we really wanna know is,
how do you think other people treat you?
When you go into that voting booth,
is that Trump supporter
gonna be like, I wanna mess
with your vote, or are they
gonna be like, nah, you're good.
I mean, like, is that
the piece of information
that we really want?
And if that's the case,
then we need to change
the question that we're asking,
or maybe add another one
to augment the
self-identification that we think,
I mean, I don't think the
federal government should be
in the business or what
category they're in,
so I don't like the idea
necessarily of interviewers,
like, I don't think
that's the right measure.
I think that has a place
if we also ask people
how they self-identify
and if we also ask them
how other people perceive them.
Then we're capturing all
kinds of different aspects
of the way that race might
come to matter in their lives.
- Can I just follow up on the
discussion that was raised
by the gentleman on the other side?
I came to the United
States in 1958 from Britain
and was just puzzled by the
fact that what I thought
were class issues turned out
here to be racial issues.
I thought we fought the Second World War
against a Germany that was,
or a people within Germany
who were trying to turn
the world into thinking
in terms of these racial
terms, that this had gone on
from the early 19th century,
and what I wanted to say is,
when I came, I felt that,
because things were perceived
as racial in the United States,
it was impossible to move
from one category to
another with any ease.
In a class society, it
may be very stratified,
but there was always the
movement between the classes.
And I think now, there are
many places in the world
such as South Africa where
they're trying to do away
with the notion of racial
classifications in order
to be able to develop a much
more egalitarian society.
Do you think this is at all possible,
that the United States would
decide that these categories
that they've drawn up, which
they perceive to be racial
and are dividing people
into different groups,
though some are thinking of themselves
in terms of the country they
came from rather than the race,
that the notion of a human
race and classes which could be
more, more open to
movement, more flexible,
would make sense?
Why not abandon the racial
categories that we've got
on the forms that we have to choose from?
- It's a great question,
and I think many people
might wish that we were in
a society where we could
all just say that we were human,
and that was all that mattered.
Unfortunately, we don't
live in that society yet.
So, we have to decide,
do we wanna continue
to collect data that
captures the way that people
might have been discriminated
against in the past
and may continue to be discriminated
against in the present.
So I think, I do think
that's the challenge, though.
If we are trying to get to
a society that doesn't rely
as much on race, how do we do that?
And I think that is an important question.
I don't think that stopping counting race
is going to get us there.
The best example of that is France.
It's illegal to count by race in France.
I would hardly say
that they are completely
discrimination-free.
So, I think it's not, I
think we shouldn't look
at the counting as the
cause of our disharmony.
In many ways, it's actually
a symptom or an attempt
to rectify the disharmony
that came from before,
and it may be that we do wanna revisit
how we ask the question.
Like I suggested, if we ask it over time
and we don't think of
it as fixed, like class,
maybe that will eventually
make us think differently
about what our racial categories
do and whether and how
they help us, but I think for now,
it would be a mistake to, it
would be like telling people
to ignore the past, like
they don't have a way
of saying, this is how our
historical legacy of racism
does affect my life currently.
We need a way for people to
say that and to express that,
and it would be great if
someday they didn't need
to express that, but I
don't think we're there yet.
- [Elizabeth] I think we have
time for one more question.
- You'll be pleased to know
this is not so much a question
as an observation, to which you
can smile intelligently and say, oh, yes.
- [Aliya] I can do that.
- At least, I hope you do.
It's an amazing segue from
the gentleman over there
who can hear where I was originally from,
also from the lady who just spoke,
because I was thinking both
about France where I used
to live, but especially South
Africa, and I'm thinking,
this is the most remarkable
case at the moment.
You have apparently, one has, excuse me,
up-ended the political power
situation, and so, therefore,
these questions of prestige
are apparently being reversed.
But in the middle, and
I'm now suggesting your
future life as a sociological
investigator, all right,
in the middle are people
who find themselves
in an amazingly ambiguous situation, who,
whatever white means and
whatever black means,
are neither, or neither, the
so-called colored people,
and I would suggest you
would find an amazing place
to compare your work here
with Cape Town or the
Western Cape, all right,
it's just a suggestion.
You're now smiling intelligently.
I knew you would.
(audience laughs)
- It's quite a job description.
- He said, condescendingly.
All right, thanks.
- No, I'm smiling, and Elizabeth
is as well, because she
knows that I had the pleasure
of teaching in Cape Town.
Stanford has a study abroad program there.
So I did live in Cape Town
for three months several years ago.
And so, I'm well aware of
the sort of racial middle
that is the colored population
there, and what I think,
I think is really interesting
about that case is, like here,
we think that you get into
the colored population
because you had a white
South African parent
and a black South African parent,
that that is, colored
is the mix of those two,
or perhaps you were the
descendant of the Malay
or the Indian, well, Indian
immigrants and Malay slaves
that also mixed with the
indigenous people, right.
This is all about mixing,
in this colored population.
But what I think is
really interesting, so,
they do still collect
race in South Africa,
even if they're trying to do away with it.
They don't collect it over time.
So, I think we would find
very similar results,
actually, in South Africa as we do here,
because although the positions
of hierarchy have changed,
I think the stereotypes
about who is high status
and who is low status have not.
And I do think South
Africa is an excellent case
because we can see if over
time, thinking decades,
(Aliya laughs)
not the years that I'm
thinking about in my survey,
but over time, does that change?
As more cohorts grow up in the world,
in the new South Africa
where black South Africans
are in power, does that change their idea?
But I think right now, unfortunately,
white, colored, and black
are status positions,
and they are tied to spatial differences,
and they are seen as things
that are still indicators
of your status in society and not,
so, colored is not just about ambiguity.
It's about a particular status position.
It's about living in particular places.
And so I think we really
have to think about
where our categories come from.
Why is it that we need a category colored,
and what does it mark?
And, this is not a good answer at all,
because I'm having like,
10 thoughts rattling around
in my brain all at the same time,
but one thing I thought
was really interesting
when I was in South Africa
is people didn't use
white, black, and colored in
everyday speech very often.
They would instead talk about places.
They would say Cape Town.
They would say Khayelitsha.
They would say, I'm
forgetting the names now.
- [Audience Member] Athlone.
- Athlone.
They would say Athlone.
They didn't even need to say colored.
You just had to say the place,
and because of the legacy
of apartheid, everybody knew
you meant colored or black or white.
So, I think there, they have, I mean,
here, we still have segregation,
but it's less dramatic
than it still is there.
There, it's literally still
written on the landscape.
You know where Khayelitsha
ends because there's a freeway
and a vast tract of empty land.
So it's literally marked in space
who quote-unquote belongs there.
And I think, I do think it's
instructive in that sense,
that we create categories
to mark difference,
and whether we call it
Khayelitsha or whether we call it
black, we're trying to
signal the same thing.
It's other over there.
It's different.
Those people are different than us
over here in Athlone or Cape Town.
- So I know there are,
some of you still have
some questions, and if you'll
join me in thanking Aliya,
you can take your questions
outside and ask her.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you all for coming.
