“It was not counting people by race that created the problem of racism”

Interview by Juliette Seban, Administrative Director of LIEPP

Aliya Saperstein is assistant professor at Stanford University. In November, she was a visiting professor at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies at Sciences Po. We interviewed her about her research work on racial mobility in the United States.

Your research introduces the concept of "racial mobility". Could you define that for us?

It is accepted by many scholars that race and ethnicity are social constructs—that is, they are not naturally occurring divisions of human societies; the names and numbers of relevant categories, and who is believed to "belong" to them, differ over time and between places. The idea of racial mobility takes this insight one step further: it is not only the categories that shift and change, individual people can also be perceived or identify with different categories over the course of their lives.

What are the factors that can explain this mobility?

A number of factors can explain why people might change racial categories over time. The most accepted idea is that it happens when people move from one place to another and they are perceived or identify differently at their destination than at their place of origin. For example, someone who was seen as “pardo” in Brazil, or “coloured” in South Africa, might move to the U.S and be perceived simply as “black” and eventually come to identify that way too. However, my research suggests changes in racial classification and identification also happen when people experience changes in social status more generally—from getting married and having children to changes in employment, or experiences with poverty and the criminal justice system.

How do you think this concept relates to the larger debate on discrimination in the U.S.?

In the past, some people in the U.S. were said to engage in a process called "passing". This occurred when someone with both African and European ancestry (or mixed ancestries more generally) presented themselves as white in order to improve their social status: get a better job, live in better neighbourhoods, have access to all the things that "white" people could do or have that "black" people could not. This form of racial mobility is an individual response to discrimination. But "passing" also feeds into the idea that white people and black people are different and maintains overall racial inequality rather than breaking it down.

Because racial inequality persists in the U.S., and there are still very strong racial stereotypes, it is also true that—whether someone wants to encourage the idea or not—other people are more likely to perceive someone as white when they better fit the stereotype of white people. This, too, is a form of discrimination. It is probably unconscious for most Americans but, in order to discriminate against someone, we first have to see them as different. It is important to recognize that, even in the case of race, we do not use only physical characteristics to make that categorization. We are more likely to see, and remember, people as white or black if they fit our stereotypes of what white or black people look like, which includes what we think white and black people do.

You are able to highlight these phenomena thanks to the availability of race data in American surveys. What is the primary objective for including racial category questions in U.S. surveys/statistics?

In the past, racial data in the U.S. was used not only to describe the diversity of the country but also to support discriminatory efforts. Perhaps the most egregious and recent example of this was using census data on the residential locations of Japanese Americans to facilitate internment efforts during World War II. However, today, and for the past several decades, the U.S. collects data on race and ethnicity explicitly to monitor and fight discrimination—especially in areas like voting and employment.

Could you tell us more about the availability of this data? Since when has it been authorised to collect this type of data in the U.S.? Are they collected in all public policy surveys?

I am not aware of any major survey in the U.S. that does not collect data on race and ethnicity. These questions also occur regularly on employment forms and school applications, as well as birth, death, and marriage certificates used to keep track of vital statistics. However, racial categories do not appear on identity documents such as driver's licenses or passports.

The surveys I use are unique because they asked the same race and ethnicity questions about the same people multiple times. It is relatively unusual to do this, but having repeated measures of race over time is what allows me to examine what else about people changes if they change racial categories over the course of their lives.

Why do you think it is culturally accepted in the US and not in France to collect this type of data?

Collecting racial data is not questioned much in the U.S. because it has been a part of our history since the very first census in 1790, when free "white" males were distinguished from all other free persons. Of course some Americans say, much like people do in France, that collecting racial data only reinforces the idea of racial differences. But ideas about racial difference and practices of discrimination existed before anyone started recording racial categories. It was not counting people by race that created the problem of racism. We can only hope that counting now can be part of the solution.

In fact, one thing I hope my research shows is that "race" is not an inherent characteristic. It is not a category you were assigned at birth and is fixed in a way that explains something essential about you. Race and ethnicity represent ways of seeing people that tell us more about how a society is organized and who or what it values than it can ever tell us about a particular person.

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