Abstract
Scholars of race have stressed the importance of thinking about race as a multidimensional construct, yet research on racial inequality does not routinely take this multidimensionality into account. We draw on data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to disentangle the effects of self-identifying as black and being classified by others as black on subsequently being arrested. Results reveal that the odds of arrest are nearly three times higher for people who were classified by others as black, even if they did not identify themselves as black. By contrast, we find no effect of self-identifying as black among people who were not seen by others as black. These results suggest that racial perceptions play an important role in racial disparities in arrest rates and provide a useful analytical approach for disentangling the effects of race on other outcomes.
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Notes
Given the relatively small numbers of respondents who were racially classified and identified differently, we report additional analyses in Online Resource 1 using a variety of alternative estimation strategies for our standard errors (all of which yield substantively similar results).
We obtained similar results from a model comparing respondents who were neither classified nor identified as black with those who (1) were both classified and identified as black, (2) were classified as black but did not identify as black, and (3) were not classified as black but identified as black.
We add these controls to account for concerns about survey design effects and the consistency of self-identification across waves (see Cheng and Powell 2011).
Models with and without controls yield similar results. We prefer the model without controls out of concern for data sparseness. We do not constrain our sample sizes to be equal across models because of the number of respondents who have missing data on control variables.
Our models do not account for other situational factors that also predict arrest because Add Health does not record detailed information about the circumstances surrounding the arrest (e.g., the evidence on which the arrest was based, the arrestee’s demeanor, and whether the arrestee complied with police commands). Future work examining the relationship between these characteristics and racial perceptions would be of great value for understanding the relationship between race and arrest (cf. Goff and Richardson 2012; Kochel et al. 2011).
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation, the UC Center for New Racial Studies, and Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences for support, to Jessica Kizer for research assistance and to Sara Wakefield for useful comments and discussions. A previous version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, San Francisco, May 2012.
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Penner, A.M., Saperstein, A. Disentangling the Effects of Racial Self-identification and Classification by Others: The Case of Arrest. Demography 52, 1017–1024 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0394-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0394-1