Racial Categorization and Intergroup Relations in Children: The Role of Social Status and Numerical Group Size

The aim of this review was to examine the effect of social and numerical group size on racial categorization and intergroup relations in children. We first described the development of racial categorization and the factors that increase the saliency of the race criterion in different contexts. Then, we examine the role of social status in intergroups relations and show that low status children express lower ingroup favoritism compared to their peers from high status groups. Few studies investigated the role of ingroup size on intergroup biases. Here, we look at this numerical variable through the proportion of children of different racial groups in the school environment. The results show that homogeneous environments contribute to the decrease of bias and negative attitudes. We discuss how identifying specific and interactive effects of the social and numerical group size would allow us to implement early and efficient intervention programs.

Maneuvering Whiteness in France

This article examines the meanings of Whiteness in France by focusing on the specific case of White converts to Islam. By becoming Muslim, converts enter religious spaces in which they are a numerical minority. Usually unmarked and unnoticed, their Whiteness is now very much visible, prompting interrogations about their racial categorization. Faced with moral dilemmas on how to best position themselves ethically while holding a position of dominance, White converts to Islam resort to a variety of strategies to portray themselves as “good Muslims” and “good Whites.” Relying on ethnography and in-depth interviewing, this article explores the contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambivalences that characterize White identities in the French context.

The Future of American Blackness: On Colorism and Racial Reorganization

This manuscript leverages the plethora of research on colorism and skin tone stratification among Black Americans to consider how the “Black” racial category may change going forward. I build on ideas about path dependence, racial and ethnic boundary formations, racial reorganization, and a case study on race and body size to explore how extant group-level differences in social outcomes and emerging differences in political attitudes between lighter skinned and darker skinned Black Americans may lead to a schism between the two groups that forces us to question what it means to identify or be identified as “Black.” The idea that “Black is Black” has become thoroughly engrained in the American imagination, facilitated by the history of “one-drop rules” and encouraged by racial segregation. This drives our racial categorization and fuels resistance to many public discussions of colorism. However, we may have reached an even more important crossroads in our examination of colorism that forces us to reckon with the question “what is a racial group?”

Doing Racial Projects in Requests for Police Service: The reproduction of racial common sense in emergency calls

Patterns of racial inequality are well-documented in domains like criminal justice, but the interactional mechanisms that produce these inequalities and constitute race remain underspecified. In this paper, I use conversation analytic research methods to examine police service calls as one site of such mechanisms. Drawing on analysis of 64 police-relevant emergency service calls placed in the United States 2005-2015, I show how the institution of emergency calls relies upon the racial categorization practices of callers and call-takers. I further show that this routine reliance on race opens the door for participants to use racist inferences to make sense of reported complaints. In this way, I illustrate how racial projects are enacted through situated social practices.

The correct way to test the hypothesis that racial categorization is a byproduct of an evolved alliance-tracking capacity

The project of identifying the cognitive mechanisms or information-processing functions that cause people to categorize others by their race is one of the longest-standing and socially-impactful scientific issues in all of the behavioral sciences. This paper addresses a critical issue with one of the few hypotheses in this area that has thus far been successful—the alliance hypothesis of race—which had predicted a set of experimental circumstances that appeared to selectively target and modify people’s implicit categorization of others by their race. Here, we will show why the evidence put forward in favor of this hypothesis was not in fact evidence in support of the hypothesis, contrary to common understanding. We will then provide the necessary and crucial tests of the hypothesis in the context of conflictual alliances, determining if the predictions of the alliance hypothesis of racial categorization in fact hold up to experimental scrutiny. When adequately tested, we find that indeed categorization by race is selectively reduced when crossed with membership in antagonistic alliances—the very pattern predicted by the alliance hypothesis. This finding provides direct experimental evidence that the human mind treats race as proxy for alliance membership, implying that racial categorization does not reflect attention to physical features per se, but rather to social relationships.