Mapping Racial Boundaries: For Whom do Contested Identities Decrease Happiness

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Race/Ethnicity, Happiness, and Self-esteem

Abstract

Objective: Racial boundaries are hard to detect. Recent scholars have argued that evaluating the consequences of contested identities across racial groups is a method to illustrate where boundaries persist. To demarcate boundaries within the racial hierarchy, I measure the influence of contested racial transitions on perceived levels of happiness among white, non-white minority, and black respondents. I assess whether patterns of reidentification and consequences of contested identities evidence the inclusion of new groups as their own category (a tri-racial hierarchy) or the broadening of whiteness. I address theoretical debates about how the racial hierarchy is likely to change as our society transitions to a minority-majority nation

Methods: Using the NSLY97, I analyze individuals who claim a different racial self-identity from how they were labeled by a member of their household at the start of the survey. I focus on those individuals whose new racial identity is contested by phenotype and singularity of racial socialization. I use an Ordered Logistic Regression of contested, transitioned self-identities on perceived level of happiness to assess whether there is variation in this relationship across racial groups.

Results: I find that individuals who were labeled as black by their household in 1997 and reidentified with a contested racial identity in 2002 experienced lower odds of being happy than stable individuals. Respondents labeled as white or as non-black minorities and who reidentified, experienced no significant differences in levels of perceived happiness, even when their new identities were contested.

Conclusion: In support of theories positing an expansion of the meaning of white; the influence of contested identities on perceived happiness clearly evidences a wall between black and anything else. But, more importantly to this theory, no clear barrier between whites and non-black minorities is evidenced.

Author

• Amy Petts, Purdue University