Who Changed? Within-Person Shifts in Competing Racial Belief Systems, 2016–2020

• In Event: What After Colorblind Racism? Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in the Modern World

Abstract

Colorblind racism has dominated sociological accounts of contemporary racial ideology, often treated as the central framework through which Americans make sense of inequality. At the same time, scholars have called for greater attention to the coexistence of multiple racial ideologies beyond colorblindness. This study responds to that call by conceptualizing racial ideology as a field of competing belief structures rather than a single dominant frame.

Using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) on nationally representative survey data, I identify multiple racial belief structures, including a Race-Evasive configuration aligned with theorization of colorblind racism; explicitly anti-Black configuration that foreground White racial grievances; and a progressive configuration characterized by consistent recognition of structural racism alongside critical stereotypes of White Americans. These findings demonstrate that contemporary racial ideology is heterogeneous and structured, not reducible to a linear prejudice continuum or dominated by a single paradigm.

Building on this configurational framework, the study then examines within-person transitions from 2016 to 2020, a period marked by heightened mobilization around Black Lives Matter (BLM). I assess how baseline views of BLM predict subsequent shifts across belief structures. Among respondents initially located in the Race-Evasive class, favorable views of BLM in 2016 are associated with movement toward belief systems that more explicitly recognize structural racism. In contrast, conservatism and Republican identification predict transitions into race-minimizing and explicitly anti-Black configurations. Non-White identification is associated with resistance to this these shifts and greater likelihood of progressive reclassification. Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of analyzing multiple belief structures and their transitions. Rather than tracking change along a linear prejudice scale or centering colorblind racism alone, this study offers an empirical, field-theoretic account of racial ideology as structured competition and political realignment within a context of heightened racial contestation.

Author

• Karen Lee, DePaul University