Dissertation
Title: “Colored by Context: The Politics of Mixed-Race Americans.“
My dissertation, Colored by Context: The Politics of Mixed-Race Americans, provides a detailed theoretical and empirical account of the factors underlying multiracials’ politics. This project focuses primarily on Black-White biracials—who tend to be the most distinctive—as well as Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites. My dissertation draws from sociology, social psychology, and political science to develop and test a new concept of social context that I call relative racial salience. Relative racial salience is the relative salience of one of the racial groups in a biracial individual’s heritage, as compared to the other, in a given social space. This project unfolds in two parts. First, I demonstrate that relative racial salience strongly predicts the racial identities biracials adopt as well as their long-term political dispositions. Second, I compare the political dispositions of biracials to those of their monoracial group counterparts to examine the current status of racial boundaries and the downstream effects of racial mixing and demographic change. I find that, in general, Black-White biracials are politically similar to Blacks, while Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites often resemble Whites. This pattern is due in large part to the fact that Black-Whites are more likely to live in contexts where the relative racial salience of their minority racial group is high, while other biracial subgroups live in Whiter contexts.
In the beginning of this project, I develop and test the theory of relative racial salience which explains some, but not all, of the observed patterns for biracials’ politics. I apply sociological and socio-psychological frameworks to argue that racial group boundaries are relatively permeable for biracials, meaning they can avail themselves of the different racial identities in their heritage as they vary contextually in fit and accessibility. I show that Black-White, Latino-White, and Asian-White biracials are united in their propensity to adopt the political psychology of the racial group with the greatest relative racial salience in their context. I substantiate the causal effect of relative racial salience using multiple identification strategies and experiments. I also advance research on social context by providing a careful deconstruction of various types of context (e.g. ranging from those more intimate in nature such as friend network and census blocks to those more distal such as census region) and clarify their expected linkages to outcomes. Overall, this part of the project highlights that racial context plays a central role in the construction and expression of politics for the growing population of multiracials.
In the second part of this project, I compare the political dispositions of minority-White biracials with those of their White and minority counterparts. These comparisons allow us the opportunity to peek into a future where each minority group has had optimal time to ‘assimilate’. In doing so, I am able to make inferences about what racial boundaries and the racial hierarchy could look like in coming decades. From a social identity theory lens, I find evidence of social mobility among Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites in that they more often adopt the political profile of the dominant group (Whites). I show that group consciousness cannot explain this pattern—biracials who report experiencing racial discrimination at rates on par with their minority counterparts still identify with Whites and have similar attitudes. On the other hand, Black-Whites, in the aggregate, are resolute in their resemblance of Blacks. These findings pose major implications for the study of Black politics and suggest the likely reification of a Black/non-Black color line in the future.
Selected Works
Gregory John Leslie “The Racial Frontier: Biracials, Machine Learning, and the Future of Racial Group Boundaries.” Working Paper.
Researchers often examine whether Biracials are more similar to either their lower or higher status racial groups to make inferences about the racial hierarchy. The former circumstance implies stable racial group boundaries via hypodescent, while the latter augurs assimilation for racial minorities and waning intergroup prejudice. This study develops machine learning algorithms using data on voters’ political characteristics to predict single-race ancestry. Algorithms are then applied to Biracials to determine how likely they are to be classified with either their lower or higher status racial group in order to empirically pinpoint their theoretical placement between them. Leveraging symbolic politics and impressionable-years hypotheses positing stable racial affect beyond early-adulthood, the algorithms are applied separately to generational cohorts to examine whether racial boundaries might be shifting overtime. Although Black ancestry continues to possess the most gravity, overtime all Biracial subgroups are becoming increasingly similar to their higher status racial groups, indicating decreasing adherence to hypodescent in their politics.
Gregory John Leslie “Permeable Group Boundaries: Why Context Matters More for Biracials.” Working Paper.
The current study extends research on social context to occasions when the ingroup is no longer fixed by examining Biracials' partisanship. I argue that racial group boundaries are more permeable for Biracials. Greater flexibility to interact as ingroup members intensifies Biracials' responsiveness to contextual cues and endows exceptional latitude to adopt the political preferences of different groups as they vary contextually in salience. To test these claims, I apply a new matching algorithm that for the first time identifies Biracial voters in administrative voting records. The unique construction of this dataset largely elides issues of residential self-selection, and I employ double-robust estimation with machine learning to derive potential effect estimates. Results illustrate that Black-White Biracials vary so extremely in their partisanship that they are often non-different from single-race Blacks in heavily Black contexts, and, more surprisingly, non-different from single-race Whites in White contexts. I replicate these findings using six separate survey datasets and a host of variation in methods and measurement, including individuized distance-weighted measures of spatial segregation and exposure. Overall, this study reveals the conditions under which Biracials may depart from long-standing expectations of minority sameness (i.e. the one-drop rule) and demonstrates that context is indeed an especially significant factor for these quickly growing groups.
Gregory John Leslie, Tye Rush, Jonathan E. Collins, and Matt Barreto (2023) “Perceived Racial Efficacy and Voter Engagement Among African-Americans” Politics, Groups, and Identities [pdf]
This paper seeks to provide clarity on the link between Black people’s perceptions of racism in American institutions and society, and voter engagement. We hypothesize that Black people with high feelings of racial efficacy—the belief that their racial group has equal influence as compared to other racial groups in politics and society—the more likely they will be to vote. Conversely, Black people with low racial efficacy are discouraged from voting. However, confidence in in-group leaders and movements can counteract the demobilizing effect of low racial efficacy. Our analysis uses data from an African American Research Collaborative national survey of 1,200 Black voters. Analysis of turnout in 2016 finds that Black people with low racial efficacy were significantly less likely to vote, all else being equal. However, we find that having highly favorable attitudes toward Barack Obama, Black elected officials, and Black Lives Matter recovers the propensity to vote for low racial efficacy Black people back to levels comparable with their racially optimistic peers. Finally, we conclude with a survey experiment which demonstrates that priming Black people with a low racial efficacy environment results in reduced faith in government, in part corroborating the causal direction theorized in our study.
Gregory John Leslie, Natalie Masuoka, Sarah E. Gaither, Jessica D. Remedios, A. Chyei Vinluan (2022) “Voter Evaluations of Biracial-Identified Political Candidates.” Social Sciences [pdf]
Research shows that, all else equal, voters tend to prefer same-race candidates. However, the increasing prominence of political officials with mixed-racial heritage charges social scientists to reevaluate how voters make race-based evaluations. This study seeks to explore how potential voters—both multiracials and monoracials—make judgements about political candidates with mixed-racial heritage but who vary in the specific racial labels they use to describe themselves. We draw upon an interdisciplinary synthesis of existing literature to inform our theoretical expectations. Namely, we expect that multiracial voters will be most supportive of candidates who signal a common ingroup identity by identifying specifically as multiracial. On the other hand, monoracial minorities and Whites should be more likely to adhere to the one drop rule or hypodescent in their evaluations, meaning they should punish multiracial candidates who identify as White, and reward those who identify with their monoracial minority group. Using an original embedded survey experiment design, we find that multiracial respondents are indeed most supportive of candidates who identify as biracial. In contrast, we find that monoracial minorities and Whites tend to completely overlook racial identity cues, and instead focus on the description of the candidate’s racial heritage. This study adds to a burgeoning literature on attitudes toward multiracial candidates and demonstrates that multiracials and monoracials differ sharply in how they perceive race.
Serena Does, Gregory John Leslie, Ariana N. Bell, Katsumi Yamaguchi- Pedroza, Khadija M. Shalbi, and Margaret Shih “How Racial Miscategorization Harms Multiracial Individuals’ Wellbeing: Comparing Samples in the Continental U.S. vs. Hawai’i.” (2021) Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology [pdf]
The current work explores the effects of racial miscategorization (incongruence between other people’s racial categorization of an individual and that individual’s racial self-identification) and subjective wellbeing of multiracial individuals in Hawai’i versus the Continental U.S.. The study consists of interviews with 55 multiracial undergraduate and graduate students conducted in Hawai’i and the Continental U.S.. Thematic analysis identified two central themes relevant to subjective wellbeing: (i) racial miscategorization and its consequences, and (ii) contextual differences in experiences of miscategorization. Results suggest that racial miscategorization is a pervasive experience among multiracial people and is associated with negative psychological wellbeing. We also found that environments with greater representation of multiracial individuals, such as Hawai’i, are associated with less racial miscategorization, more inclusion, and better psychological wellbeing among multiracial individuals. Theoretical and practical implications for social identity research are discussed.
Gregory John Leslie and David O. Sears “The Heaviest Drop of Blood: The Persistence of Black Exceptionalism Among Multiracials” (2022) Political Psychology [pdf] [appendix]
We leverage the emerging multiracial population to reexamine prominent theories of the American color line. A Black exceptionalism hypothesis suggests that part-Black heritage will be more restrictive of assimilation prospects than part-Asian or part-Latino heritage. Black exceptionalism better explains their sorting into the racial hierarchy than does classic assimilation theory or a people of color hypothesis. In the American Community Survey, part-Black heritage dominates subjective racial self-identification among biracial adults and identity assignments to children of interracial marriages. In the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracials, Black-White biracials’ social identity, social networks, perceptions of discrimination, and political attitudes relevant to race resemble those of monoracial Blacks, whereas Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites are more similar to monoracial Whites than to their minority group counterparts. While part-Latino and part-Asian individuals exhibit some propensity to assimilate into the American mainstream, part-Black Americans are still uniquely situated behind a most impermeable color line.
Gregory John Leslie ”Coloured by Context: The Politics of Racial Passing in South Africa and the United States” Working Paper
Ethnic census literature well substantiates that people are inclined to vote for the party of their ethnic group. However, this literature has not adequately theorized the political behavior of multiracial or mixed-race individuals. This paper presents a theory of multiracial political behavior which argues that racial context is an especially key determinant of mixed-race individuals’ politics. Whereas monoracials or single ethnic-group individuals hold similar patterns of behavior across contexts, mixed-race individuals tend to adopt the partisanship of the racial group most dominant in their space. Using South African Coloureds and American Black-White biracials as case studies, I test this theory using five different academic surveys. I supplement quantitative findings with 25 qualitative interviews with Coloured individuals in South Africa. Results show that Coloureds tend to vote for the Democratic Alliance (popularly White party) when they exist in higher density White contexts, and the African National Congress (Black party) in Black contexts. Black-White biracials mirror this behavior but with Republicans and Democrats, respectively. Ultimately, this paper adds to racial politics literature by demonstrating that considering racial context is critical for theorizing or predicting future multiracial political behavior.
Gregory John Leslie, Christopher T. Stout, and Naomi Tolbert “The Ben Carson Effect: Do Voters Prefer Racialized or Deracialized Black Candidates” (2019) Social Science Research [pdf]
A plethora of research has explored how blacks and whites respond to deracialized and racialized outreach. However, these studies overwhelmingly focus on individuals' reactions to liberal black elites. We explore whether whites and/or blacks favor co-racial elites who take a conservative deracialized position in the form of support for privatizing social security or a conservative racialized position in the form of advocating for ending the norm of political correctness. Using an online experiment with an oversample of black respondents, we find that whites, and in particular white Republicans, have a strong preference for racialized black conservatives over deracialized black conservatives. In contrast, we find that blacks display a preference for deracialized co-racial conservatives, but view black and white racialized conservatives as being equally likeable.