Perceptions of Inequality

Culture and Social Analysis Workshop presentations by 

Lauren Valentino, UNC Chapel Hill

Addressing misperceptions of racial wealth inequality: Historical and narrative framings shift policy attitudes

Racial disparities in wealth lead to unequal access to opportunities in the U.S. We investigate how Black/White and Hispanic/White wealth gaps are (mis)understood by Americans and test three potential interventions to influence downstream wealth-equalizing policy attitudes. Across 3 studies (n=11,605), we show that upwards of 96% of Americans consistently underestimate racial disparities in wealth between Black and Hispanic versus White Americans. We test three interventions designed to address these misperceptions: (1) providing numerical information stating the actual wealth gap size alongside the participant’s estimate; (2) providing this numerical information plus a narrative illustrating differences in wealth between two families; and (3) providing the numerical information plus a historical explanation of racial wealth gaps (e.g. redlining, the racially exclusionary implementation of the G.I. Bill). We find that the numeric intervention is wholly ineffective, while the narrative and historical context interventions both significantly increase support for wealth-equalizing policies. These effects hold regardless of one’s own income/wealth, racial identification, and extent of misestimate of the racial wealth gap. These two interventions shift policy preferences through distinct pathways: the historical context intervention heightens participants’ structural attributions for racial disparities in wealth, while the narrative intervention increases empathy for Black and Hispanic Americans. This study adds to a growing body of work aimed at combatting misinformation about racial wealth inequalities by identifying effective strategies for increasing public support for wealth-equalizing policy interventions.

Mari Sanchez, Harvard

Unmaking Non-White Meta Categories in the US and the UK

Building on a constructivist turn, scholarship on race/ethnicity has typically prioritized ethnoracial formation, examining how social collectivities are made from multiple potential bases for membership. Scholars consequently lack a complete understanding of the life courses of categories, and much less attention has been paid to systematically theorizing the unmaking of ethnoracial categories. By “unmaking,” I refer to the process by which actors work to eliminate the institutional usage of a category.  To understand how categories are unmade, I leverage the comparative cases of the categories “BAME” (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) in the UK and “people of color” (POC) in the US. I unspool the literature on category-making to develop a theory of unmaking categories. I identify two phases of category unmaking: 1) destabilization, which involves unsettling the problem definitions that make certain categories necessary and legitimate in the first place; and 2) infrastructural withdrawal, which involves methodically removing a category from the evaluative, institutional, and data systems that reproduce it.