How Weak Racial Identities are Strong: Racial Identity Strength, Symbolic Resources, and Social Ties

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

Abstract

This manuscript provides a theoretically informed answer to the question of why blacks have smaller networks and fewer weak ties than whites? By integrating work on racial identity with theories of cultural resources, I outline a framework of racial identity as a symbolic resource that predicts that weak racial identities allow actors to establish diverse weak social ties, while strong identities promote smaller, strong-tie networks. Negative binomial modeling of General Social Survey data reveals that perceived racial identity strength does have an effect on the size and number of weak ties of an actor’s social network. Interestingly, for whites, weak racial identity has a positive effect on number of social ties and weak ties. For blacks, it has the opposite effect. Identity thickness, which provides a weak measure of homophily, is positively correlated with number of social ties, but has no statistically significant effect. These findings suggest that race is a form of cultural capital, and that black and white identities provide qualitatively distinct types of resources for social interaction. In addition to explaining the racial disparity in social networks, these findings extend work on race as cultural capital and provide a mechanism that connects structural racial inequality to micro-interactions more broadly.

Author

• Danielle Hedegard, University of California-San Diego