By asattar949@gmail.com 
Raj Ghoshal, associate professor of sociology, published the first study to examine racial differences in what people think constitutes “race”
Sociologist Raj Ghoshal published the article “Racial Appraisals by White, Black, Hispanic, and Multiracial Americans” in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, an official journal of the American Sociological Association.
Racial appraisals refer to the judgments people make about other people’s race and the grounds they use when doing so, such as ancestry, physical appearance, or culture. These judgments historically underlay slavery, segregation and land expropriation, and continue to shape discrimination and anti-discrimination policy.
Prior research had focused almost exclusively on appraisals by white Americans. Ghoshal conducted an original survey with a nationally representative sample of 1,100 people to examine how Americans of varied races constitute race.
Ghoshal found that people of all races use cues of ancestry and appearance to gauge others’ race, but Black and Hispanic Americans are far more likely than whites to think of experiences as one basis for race. For instance, Black Americans consider not just ancestry and appearance but also whether a person’s family experienced enslavement or segregation as a major factor in appraising Black identity, while Hispanic individuals consider whether a person has lived in a Spanish-speaking context as one factor in Hispanic identity.
He also found that Americans accord weight to self-identification and intra-cultural judgments in assessing some claims. For instance, Americans of all races think that whether a person considers themself Hispanic is an important factor in whether they are Hispanic, and that whether an official tribal entity considers a person to be Native American is similarly important in whether they are indeed Native American. But Americans give less weight to self-identification in deciding white or Black identity.
The goal of Ghoshal’s research is not to establish a “correct” logic of racial appraisals or race concepts, since no such correct logic exists. Rather, it is to understand change and constancy in America’s racial system, with an eye toward eliminating racial hierarchy and injustice. The research was supported by Elon’s Faculty Research and Development.
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