Essentialist or Constructivist? Americans’ Understandings of the Meaning of Race

• In Event: Reconsidering Racism and Racial Identity

Abstract

In the United States, race is one of the most salient points of social categorization. Babies as young as six months old begin to differentiate across faces of different races (Kelly et al. 2007), and adults recognize racial differences in the blink of an eye (Blair, Judd, and Fallman 2004). Racial and ethnic disparities in the health, economic, and social repercussions of COVID-19 have emerged in news coverage of the pandemic, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd reignited long-simmering racial tensions in the US. Given that race matters so much in American society, what exactly is it? That is, how do ordinary Americans define race? If race is a fixed, “natural” characteristic, then this implies that there are meaningful and invariable biological differences across individuals. If race is a social construct, then this suggests a need for intentional work that highlights the socially constructed nature of racial differences and identifies policy solutions to address disparities. How people understand what race means—whether essential or socially constructed—plays a critical role in how people subsequently consider policies and institutional practices that relate to race.

In this paper, we examine lay understandings of race among individuals representing four major racial and ethnic groups in the US: Asian people, Black people, Latino people, and non-Hispanic white people. We begin with an original survey, including open- and close-ended questions about the nature of race, to describe and analyze Americans’ definitions of race. We first provide a qualitative analysis of themes unearthed in open-ended responses to questions about the meaning of race, and then subject these themes to systematic quantitative analysis to provide the descriptive terrain for lay understandings of race. In open-ended responses to “how do you define ‘race?’” we find that Americans’ definitions of race are complex and multifaceted. Further, our content analysis of these definitions reveals the following themes, in order of prevalence: race as (1) physical traits, (2) people and places of the past, (3) culture, (4) biology/genetics, and (5) social construction. In response to close-ended questions about the role of biology and the importance of a range of factors in determining race, despite the lack of explicit emphasis on biological essentialism in respondents’ open-ended comments, respondents underscore the role of biology when presented with that theme. For the open- and close-ended responses, we find few differences across respondent racial and ethnic groups, and few differences between white Democrats and white Republicans.

We supplement our findings regarding understandings of the nature of race with a survey experiment that examines the malleability of these understandings and applies them to policy opinions and racial attitudes. First, in the context of a specific health issue, we randomly present respondents with one of three frames to explain racial health disparities: an essentialist frame, a constructivist frame, or a “neutral” frame. We then ask questions about old-fashioned racism, negative racial stereotypes, and policy solutions to address health disparities to investigate how elite rhetoric influences Americans’ understandings of race. Given the continued prevalence of discourse on COVID-19’s racially disparate impacts, these elite and mass understandings of race may be particularly salient and consequential in this moment. This paper thus examines these understandings of the meaning of race, the extent to which they are shaped by elite discourse, and their implications for public opinion, racial attitudes, and policymaking.

Authors

• Allison Penelope Anoll, Vanderbilt University

• Cindy D. Kam, Vanderbilt University

• Colette Marcellin, Vanderbilt University