Abstract
Research on racial fluidity has become increasingly common as researchers seek to understand the ways and reasons people change their racial identifications and/or are perceived differently over time and across contexts. Concurrently, researchers have deepened their investigations of the attitudinal and identity aspects of “color,” that is the ways that people’s racial and political attitudes vary based on skin tone among members of the same racial group, particularly black Americans. This paper attempts to blend research on racial fluidity and color into an exploration of adolescent racial identity formation. I examine the effect skin tone on the likelihood and type of racial identity change among multiracial black adolescents as they transition into adulthood. My results reveal that lighter skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to a non-black single race, while darker skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to black only.
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Notes
Hutchings et al. (2016) offer a direct challenge to conventional wisdom on black political attitude differences based on color, which has typically revealed that light- and dark-skinned black people harbored the same political and racial attitudes, a phenomenon dubbed the “skin color paradox” (Hochschild and Weaver 2007; Seltzer and Smith 1991). For a review of the skin color paradox and its challenges, see Reece and Upton (2017).
Wave 5 was being collected at the time of this writing.
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Reece, R.L. Coloring Racial Fluidity: How Skin Tone Shapes Multiracial Adolescents’ Racial Identity Changes. Race Soc Probl 11, 290–298 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09269-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09269-w