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Shades of Privilege: The Relationship Between Skin Color and Political Attitudes Among White Americans

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Abstract

Shifting racial dynamics in the U.S. have heightened the salience of White racial identity, and a sense that Whites’ social status and resources are no longer secure. At the same time, the growing size of non-White populations has also renewed attention to skin color-based stratification and the potential blurring of racial boundaries. We theorize that Whites with darker skin will be motivated to protect the boundaries of Whiteness due to the loss of status they would face from blurring racial boundaries. Consistent with growing evidence of skin color’s importance for Whites, we demonstrate that darker-skinned Whites—measured via a light-reflectance spectrophotometer—identify more strongly with their White racial identity and are more likely to hold conservative political views on racialized issues than lighter-skinned Whites. Together, these findings offer new insights into the evolving meaning of race and color in American politics.

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Notes

  1. For purposes of brevity, we will use “White” to refer to individuals who identify only as White and do not identify as Hispanic, Latino, Middle Eastern or North African (or any other non-White group).

  2. Human assessments of skin color are valuable in that they capture the social associations with skin color that are at the core of the American race and color constructs, while light-reflectance measures are unable to do so. Yet, while we know that skin color assessments are shaped by both physiological and social considerations, it becomes difficult to disentangle the role of each of these when using only one measure of skin color. In turn, our focus in this paper is on identifying the social and political associations with just the physiological (and not the social) element of skin color. In other work, we explore both the physiological and social elements of the skin color construct and the relationship between them (see Ostfeld and Yadon forthcoming).

  3. For more information on machine-rated skin tone measurement, see Shriver and Parra (2000).

  4. King and Johnson’s data does not separate out Hispanic and non-Hispanic Whites, however. Through Hispanic surname matching, they find that the effects of skin tone weaken when taking likely Hispanic background into account, but the effects of Afrocentric features do not.

  5. Further, our data collection occurs solely in the Detroit and Chicago metropolitan regions where these enclaves are not as persistently identified as those in the Northeast.

  6. The analyses presented below do not control for the survey site because we have a large number of sites (n = 24) and a relatively small dataset. However, if we re-estimate the models with additional controls for site locations, the results remain consistent. Moreover, our results are consistent when using robust standard errors in our regression estimates.

  7. To assess whether there was a selection bias, we had interviewers estimate the skin color of respondents as well as non-respondents (those who were invited to participate but refused). We found no significant difference (p = 0.35).

  8. While we focus on the significance of the physiological element of skin color in this paper, we focus on the social elements of the skin color construct in other work (Ostfeld and Yadon forthcoming).

  9. Additional details on the color measurement can be found in the product manual (X-Rite 2013).

  10. Spectrophotometers are commonly used by public health scholars, interior designers, and dermatologists, as well as in cosmetics stores.

  11. This lack of association between skin color and income is surprising. We believe this may be due in part to the student populations in some areas in which we collected data, as well as question wording which asked for one’s annual (as opposed to monthly) income. We observed uncertainty on-site when individuals sought to convert their weekly or monthly income into yearly income.

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  1. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Nicole Yadon

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Mara C. Ostfeld

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We express our sincere thanks to Ted Brader, Christopher DeSante, Vince Hutchings, Ashley Jardina, Don Kinder, Spencer Piston, Deborah Schildkraut, Nick Valentino, and Cara Wong, as well as participants in the 2018 PRIEC at UC San Diego and 2019 joint UM-MSU Race and Politics Mini-Conference for constructive feedback on this project. We are indebted to the Russell Sage Foundation for their financial support to perform data collection for this project, as well as our team of research assistants: Kamri Hudgins, Daniel Lopez, Lydia Lopez, Isabel McMullen, and Crystal Robertson. Replication materials are available at https://bit.ly/3ijmHwD.

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Yadon, N., Ostfeld, M.C. Shades of Privilege: The Relationship Between Skin Color and Political Attitudes Among White Americans. Polit Behav 42, 1369–1392 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09635-0

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