Interrogating Race: Color, Racial Categories, and Class Across the Americas. (April 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bailey, Stanley R.; Fialho, Fabrício M.; Penner, Andrew M.
• Other Names: Roth Wendy D. guest-editor.; Campbell Mary E. guest-editor.; Bratter Jenifer L. guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: American behavioral scientist. Volume 60:Number 4(2016:Apr.)
• Page Start: 538
• Page End: 555
• Publication Date: 2016-04
• Subjects: race -- skin color -- racial inequality -- social origin -- United States -- Latin America; Social sciences -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals; United States -- Politics and government -- Periodicals; 300
• DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613400
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0002-7642

Abstract

We address long-standing debates on the utility of racial categories and color scales for understanding inequality in the United States and Latin America, using novel data that enable comparisons of these measures across both broad regions. In particular, we attend to the degree to which color and racial category inequality operate independently of parental socioeconomic status. We find a variety of patterns of racial category and color inequality, but that in most countries accounting for maternal education changes our coefficients by 5% or less. Overall, we argue that several posited divergences in ethnoracial stratification processes in the United States, compared with Latin America, might be overstated. We conclude that the comparison of the effects of multiple ethnoracial markers, such as color and racial categories, for the analysis of social stratification holds substantial promise for untangling the complexities of "race" across the Americas.