The Cost of Color: Skin Tone, Discrimination, and Health among African Americans

• In Event: 285 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Paper Session. Intersectionality and Methods: Multidimensional and Multilevel Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Class Data

Abstract

In this study, I utilize a recently conducted, nationally-representative survey of African Americans, to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African Americans in the early 21st century. I find that skin tone is significantly associated the frequency of discrimination African Americans perceive, the incidence of depression and hypertension, as well as self-rated mental and physical health (even after controlling for a host of sociodemographic and other relevant factors). Such findings make considerable contributions to a nexus of literatures on colorism, ethnoracial disparities and differences in health, in addition to the study of ethnoracial inequality in general. Furthermore, exploiting a unique feature of this nationally-representative survey, its two measures of skin tone (interviewer-rated and self-reported), I find that while previous work has assumed that self-reported measures of skin tone are ‘inferior’ to interviewer-rated or machine-measured skin tone data, self-reported skin tone data is often a stronger predictor of the outcomes of interest in this study than even interviewer-rated skin tone data. I explain this by way of a symbolic interactionist phenomenon known as “reflected appraisals,” which other research has relied upon to explain ethnoracial self-classification in the U.S. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of colorism, ethnoracial disparities in health, and recent work on the multidimensionality of “race,” with a focus on offering directions for future research.

Author

• Ellis Prentis Monk, University of Chicago