Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from an Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents’ preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

Geography of racial coresidence

Whereas most work on residential race relations in US cities is based on the concept of segregation, our approach studies this issue from a who-lives-with-whom perspective. To this end, we study coresidence profiles – percentages of a given racial subpopulation living in different population zones. Population zones are data-driven divisions of a city based on characteristic racial compositions. We used 1990 and 2010 decennial census block-level data for 61 largest US metropolitan areas to calculate coresidence profiles for four major racial subpopulations in each city at both years. Profiles for each race/year combination were clustered into three archetypes. Cities, where given race profiles belong to the same archetype, have similar coresidence patterns with respect to this race. We present the geographic distributions of co-habitation profiles and show how they changed during the 1990-2010 period. Our results revealed that coresidence profiles depend not only on racial preferences but also on the availability of racial groups; cities in the different geographical regions have different coresidence profiles because they have different shares of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian subpopulations. Temporal changes in coresidence profiles are linked to the increased share of Hispanic and Asian populations.

Affirmative Action in Medical School: A Comparative Exploration

A significant body of evidence shows that law schools and many elite colleges use large admissions preferences based on race, and other evidence strongly suggests that large preferences can undermine student achievement in law school and undergraduate science majors, thus producing highly counterproductive effects. This article draws on available evidence to examine the use of racial preferences in medical school admissions, and finds strong reasons for concern about the effects and effectiveness of current affirmative action efforts. The author calls for better data and careful investigation of several identified patterns.

Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: III. A Process-Level Examination of Changes in Implicit Preferences

Implicit bias change was initially assumed to reflect changes in associations, but subsequent research demonstrated that implicit bias change can also reflect changes in control-oriented processes that constrain the expression of associations. The present research examines the process-level effects of 17 different implicit bias-reduction interventions and one sham intervention by analyzing data from more than 20,000 participants who completed an intervention condition or a baseline control condition followed by a race Implicit Association Test (IAT). To identify the processes influenced by each intervention, we applied the Quadruple process model to participants’ IAT responses then meta-analyzed parameter estimates according to a taxonomy of interventions based on shared features. Interventions that relied on counterstereotypic exemplars or strategies to override biases influenced both associations and control-oriented processes, whereas interventions that relied on evaluative conditioning influenced only control-oriented processes. In contrast, interventions that focused on egalitarian values, perspective taking, or emotion had no reliable influence on any of the processes examined. When interventions did change associations, they were much more likely to reduce positive White associations than negative Black associations. The present research extends upon traditional dual-process perspectives by identifying robust intervention effects on response biases. These findings connect features of interventions with changes in the processes underlying implicit bias.

Reinforcing the Racial Structure: Observed Race and Multiracial Internet Daters’ Racial Preferences

Is the growing multiracial population changing the US racial structure? This study examines how self-identifying with more than one racial group relates to racial dating choices—an outcome that reveals multiracial individuals’ agency in the process of racial boundary-making and reduction. Quantitative analyses of profiles drawn from the largest online dating website, combined with observer racial classifications of profile photos, reveal divergent patterns in racial preferences among multiracials who self-identify as part-Black compared with those who do not. Non-Black multiracials express racial preferences that are more similar to Whites than to minorities, consistent with Whitening theories suggesting that these groups situate themselves closer to Whites and reinforce the existing racial hierarchy. In contrast, part-Black multiracials’ preferences are more similar to Blacks. However, regardless of racial self-identity, multiracial online daters’ exclusion of Whites as possible dates depends upon how they are racially perceived by others—their observed race. In particular, among self-identified part-Black multiracials, those whom others view as non-Black are much more accepting of Whites as dates than are those whom others classify as Black. Since preferences for dating Whites vary substantially among individuals who self-identify as part-Black depending upon their observed race, this suggests a decline in the salience of the one-drop rule, even while some aspects of Black exceptionalism persist among multiracials whom others classify solely as Black.