Who is Black? Black Americans’ Identities and Appraisals of Blackness

• In Event: 40852 - Race and Ethnicity: Racialization, Socialization, and Identity

Abstract

James Davis’s now-classic Who is Black? (2001) examined the legal and social construction of Blackness from the country’s roots up to the close of the Twentieth Century, with particular attention to White-led racialization. This article extends Davis’s project and examines the same question—“Who is Black?”—by considering present-day Black Americans’ own understandings of Black identity. I draw on original survey data that examines Black Americans’ views on the importance of 13 different factors (such as traceable African ancestry, cultural identity, self-identification, etc.) to Black identity. I also examine how self-classification as Black-alone, Black-White, and Black-Other relates to these measures, to open-ended descriptive self-identification, and to classifying oneself as “multiracial.” I find several intriguing differences between self-classified Black alone respondents and those who self-classify as Black and another race in terms of how they view Blackness, but neither group sees multiraciality as disqualifying of Blackness. Instead, the groups diverge on what importance they give to socioeconomic background, ancestors’ experiences of slavery and segregation, time spent with same-race others, and other peoples’ appraisals, as elements of Black identity. That the identity difference along which views of Black identity split is unrelated to the topics of the split is striking, given that academics have long asked whether multiraciality might split the Black community but always assumed that the content of this split would mirror its demographic basis. I consider roots of this pattern and its implications for intra-group cohesion.

Author

• Raj Andrew Ghoshal, Elon University