Bridging Nodes: How Race/Ethnicity Affects the Breadth of Cultural Tastes

• In Event: 20203 - Discerning Consumers across Race, Class, and Moral Divides

Abstract

Taste in music, literature, and the arts has been a rich site for studying the relationship between culture and stratification for decades. This work consistently finds that socioeconomic status shapes the volume of culture consumed, yet questions about the breadth of musical tastes remain. The effects of race/ethnicity inequality also remain submerged in most of the existing research; serving as controls but little more. To address these issues, using two years of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (n=2,773), we use regression analysis to differentiate between the volume of cultural items and the breadth of taste patterns. The findings suggest that the volume of cultural items selected is predicted by levels of cultural capital (parental education and arts courses) but the breadth of choices is more clearly shaped by race/ethnicity differences. The taste patterns of Whites tend to have less breadth than those of Blacks, Hispanics, or Asians in the US. Minorites are more likely to consume music from both non-dominant and dominant groups than Whites. These findings confirm existing qualitative work which suggests that minorities have to navigate between dominant and non-dominant cultural worlds, in a way that their White counterparts do not. We argue that a strict focus on socioeconomic status in taste research has been short-sighted; and a deep consideration of how race/ethnicity have shaped patterns of taste is long overdue.

Authors

• Thomas Anthony Calkins, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Julian Schaap, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Michaël Berghman, Erasmus University Rotterdam