Children’s cross-cultural categorizations of racially ambiguous faces in Taiwan and the U.S.

Objectives: Racially ambiguous face categorization research is growing in prominence, and yet the majority of this work has focused on White and Western samples and has primarily used biracial Black/White stimuli. Past findings suggest that biracial Black/White faces are more often seen as Black than White, but without testing these perceptions with other groups, generalizability cannot be guaranteed. Methods: We tested 3-7-year old Asian children living in Taiwan—an Eastern cultural context (N = 74)—and Asian children living in the U.S.—a Western cultural context (N = 65) to explore the role that cultural group membership may play in biracial perceptions. Children categorized 12 racially ambiguous biracial Black/White faces and 12 biracial Asian/White faces in a dichotomous forced-choice task and completed a racial constancy measurement. Results: Regarding biracial Black/White faces, Taiwanese and Asian American children both categorized the faces as White significantly more often compared to chance levels, regardless of racial constancy beliefs. For biracial Asian/White faces, Taiwanese children with racial constancy beliefs categorized the faces significantly more often as White, whereas Taiwanese children without racial constancy beliefs categorized the faces significantly more often as Asian. However, Asian American children did not show a bias in categorizing biracial Asian/White faces. Conclusions: Results suggest that hyperdescent over hypodescent for more commonly studied biracial Black/White faces generalizes in both cultural contexts. However, biracial Asian/White stimuli may be perceived in more fixed-like patterns in predominately Asian contexts, since only Taiwanese children showed increased outgroup categorizations once racial constancy beliefs were endorsed.

Liberals=Black? Racially Ambiguous People’s Beliefs Determine Others’ Perceptions of Their Racial Identity and Racial Phenotype

As the multiracial population continues to grow, the boundaries between different racial groups are becoming increasingly ambiguous. Yet, we might still spontaneously identify racially ambiguous people as Black or White, and treat them differently as a result. This paper identifies a novel variable that determines our identification of someone’s race—the person’s political values and beliefs (i.e., ideology). Six experiments (five pre-registered) with 3369 participants show that we perceive racially ambiguous people more likely to be Black, and, in most cases, to have darker skin color, if they are liberal than if they are conservative. The effects most likely reflect a motivated social perception, as opposed to a motivated memory recall, and the effects are stronger for people who believe in the White=conservative and Black=liberal stereotypes. Together, the current studies reveal a novel cause of our perceptions about race and skin color, suggesting that our values and beliefs can literally change how we look in the eye of others.

Inlaws, Outlaws, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Oklahoma

While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in the Indian Territories, as well as an analysis of media coverage of Oklahoma crime, this article shows that this explosion of state-building was due, in part, to the ways in which kinship rules in Oklahoma allowed racially ambiguous inhabitants to be castigated as “outlaws.” This, in turn, opened up space for the federal marshal apparatus—which was primarily white—to expand its role as the purveyors of local law and order in a manner that had never been possible in the South.

Falling through the cracks: Modeling the formation of social category boundaries

Social categorizations divide people into “us” and “them”, often along continuous attributes such as political ideology or skin color. This division results in both positive consequences, such as a sense of community, and negative ones, such as group conflict. Further, individuals in the middle of the spectrum can fall through the cracks of this categorization process and are seen as out-group by individuals on either side of the spectrum, becoming inbetweeners. Here, we propose a quantitative, dynamical-system model that studies the joint influence of cognitive and social processes. We model where two social groups draw the boundaries between “us” and ‘them” on a continuous attribute. Our model predicts that both groups tend to draw a more restrictive boundary than the middle of the spectrum. As a result, each group sees the individuals in the middle of the attribute space as an out-group. We test this prediction using U.S. political survey data on how political independents are perceived by registered party members as well as existing experiments on the perception of racially ambiguous faces, and find support.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

The neural basis of ideological differences in race categorization

Multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their ‘socially subordinate’ racial group—a form of social discrimination termed hypodescent—with political conservatives more likely than liberals to show this bias. Although hypodescent has been linked to racial hierarchy preservation motives, it remains unclear how political ideology influences categorization: Do conservatives and liberals see, feel or think about mixed-race faces differently? Do they differ in sensitivity to Black prototypicality (i.e. skin tone darkness and Afrocentric features) or racial ambiguity (i.e. categorization difficulty) of Black/White mixed-race faces? To help answer these questions, we collected a politically diverse sample of White participants and had them categorize mixed-race faces as Black or White during functional neuroimaging. We found that conservatism was related to greater anterior insula activity to racially ambiguous faces, and this pattern of brain activation mediated conservatives' use of hypodescent. This demonstrates that conservatives' greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity (rather than Black prototypicality) gives rise to greater categorization of mixed-race individuals into the socially subordinate group and tentatively suggests that conservatives may differ from liberals in their affective reactions to mixed-race faces. Implications for the study of race categorization and political psychology are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

Shining a Light on Race: Contrast and Assimilation Effects in the Perception of Skin Tone and Racial Typicality

Researchers have long debated the extent to which an individual’s skin tone influences their perceived race. Brooks and Gwinn (2010) demonstrated that the race of surrounding faces can affect the perceived skin tone of a central target face without changing perceived racial typicality, suggesting that skin lightness makes a small contribution to judgments of race compared to morphological cues (the configuration and shape of the facial features). However, the lack of a consistent light source may have undermined the reliability of skin tone cues, encouraging observers to rely disproportionately on morphological cues instead. The current study addresses this concern by using 3D models of male faces with typically Black African or White European appearances that are illuminated by the same light source. Observers perceived target faces surrounded by White faces to have darker skin than those surrounded by Black faces, particularly for faces of intermediate lightness. However, when asked to judge racial typicality, a small assimilation effect was evident, with target faces perceived as more stereotypically White when surrounded by White than when surrounded by Black faces at intermediate levels of typicality. This evidence of assimilation effects for perceived racial typicality despite concurrent contrast effects on perceived skin lightness supports the previous conclusion that perceived skin lightness has little influence on judgments of racial typicality for racially ambiguous faces, even when lighting is consistent.