Color-Blind to Change? How Whites and PoC Talk about Rising Diversity

• In Event: Social Identity, Racial Identity, and Political Behavior

Abstract

America is undergoing a historic demographic shift: the U.S. Census Bureau projects that around mid-century the White-only population will become a numerical minority while people of color will collectively become the numerical majority. To date, scholars have offered competing perspectives about the implications of this majority-minority shift for how Americans understand and talk about race. On the one hand, some argue that race has become an increasingly salient and explicit part of American social and political life. By contrast, others argue that color-blind ideology is now the primary lens through which most Americans evaluate racial issues and events. We test these alternative theories by asking large, diverse samples of Americans to explain in their own words how they feel about the projected changes in the nation’s racial composition and employing both qualitative and quantitative analyses of their responses.

This study relies on a novel data collection effort: the American Multiracial Panel Study (AMPS), a nationally representative panel survey tracking the opinions of diverse samples of American adults. For this study, we analyze responses to wave 1 of the panel, which was fielded by YouGov from June 10-21, 2023, to five large adult samples of Asian (n = 678), Black (n = 985), Latino (n = 975), Multiracial (n = 764), and White (1,000) Americans, with over-samples of Republicans in each group, for a total sample size of 4,402 respondents. In the survey, we asked respondents if they think the projected majority-minority shift will be good, bad, or neither good nor bad for the country, and then to explain their view in an open-ended prompt.

These data provide a unique opportunity to investigate how Americans across several major ethno-racial groups are responding to rising diversity by employing color-blind ideology -- that is, to paraphrase Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, by offering seemingly nonracial responses to racial population projections. Prior research has focused on people who identify solely as White -- that is, Whites who are neither Hispanic nor multiracial -- and typically finds heightened racial threat, White identification, and exclusionary attitudes consistent with an explicitly racial response. However, our preliminary analyses reveal many color-blind responses among Whites, suggesting a more complex picture.

Although it may seem surprising, our first look at the data reveals that many people of color also employ color-blind perspectives to explain their views about rising racial diversity, consistent with prior examining color-blind ideology among PoC. The unusually large samples of Asian, Black, Latino, and Multiracial Americans in our survey will allow us to investigate differences both between and within groups in a) how often people employ color-blind language, b) the style and form that their expressions of color-blindness take, and c) the demographic and attitudinal predictors of expressions of color-blind ideology.

Our data will enable us to test a range of theories about whether and how members of different racial groups respond to projections of the majority-minority shift with expressions of color-blind ideology. Racial triangulation theory, for instance, suggests that the relative social status of racial groups will influence responses to rising diversity, with use of color-blind language less likely among those experiencing greater marginalization. Based on their positions in the American racial hierarchy, Whites should be most likely to deploy color-blind ideology, followed in ascending order by Asian, Latino, and Black Americans. Of course, there is substantial heterogeneity within each group, and we will examine a variety of factors, such as generational status, strength of racial group identification, political ideology and party identification, religiosity, intergroup contact, and motivation to control prejudice, among others.

The style and form in which color-blindness is expressed may also vary across and within racial groups. One prominent theory proposed by Helen Neville and her colleagues suggests that color-blind ideology comes in two forms: color-evasion, or ignoring race and racial differences, and power-evasion, or denying the existence of racism and unequal opportunity. We build on this theory by testing the hypothesis that people of color will be relatively more likely than Whites to express color-blindness through color-evasion than power-evasion. At the same time, we expect to find significant heterogeneity within groups: individuals who express a stronger sense of identification and solidarity with their racial group should, we hypothesize, display lower levels of color-blind ideology. In-depth qualitative analysis will further reveal the nature and variety of color-blind responses to America’s increasingly diverse future.

Authors

• Seth K. Goldman, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Bel Corder, University of Massachusetts Amherst