https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3926-7015
![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The political term “women of color” (WOC) emerged in the late 1970s in Black feminist organizing spaces as a rejection of a singular emphasis on a woman identity. At that time, a WOC identity signaled a political commitment to solidarity politics. Currently, the term “women of color” (WOC) is used by the media and among politicians but without much explicit discussion of its history. Given WOC’s continued presence in American politics, the question remains, who identifies as a WOC today and does the identity continue to hold political meaning? We examine Black women and Latinas and find the majority of Latinas and Black women self-identify as WOC and see it as an important part of their identity. Consistent with our expectations, the WOC identity is more likely to be taken up and regarded as important by native-born Latinas and Afro-Latinas compared with other Latinas. While past research has examined racial and gender consciousness, ours is the first public opinion study to examine whether there is continued utility in a WOC identity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Black women and Latinas are not the only women who may self-identify as WOC; in this paper, due to data limitations, we focus on Black women and Latinas – the two largest racialized groups of women in the United States.
2 Hereinafter we use “Latina/o” to refer to either Hispanic or Latina/o.
3 Though see Greer Citation2013; Smith Citation2014, and Gooding Citation2019. Additionally, Beltrán (Citation2010) historizes the utility of a panethnic Latino identity and warns about the trouble with such unified group.
4 Bejarano et al. (Citation2020) use 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) data to examine Black and Latino views on Black and Latino candidates by candidate gender but do not investigate WOC candidates explicitly.
5 Contemporary work on Black Cuban race consciousness also points to the existence of Black consciousness in Cuba (Clealand Citation2017).
6 Importantly, our measure of race and Afrolatinidad are based on self-identification. We allowed self-identified women to choose their race(s), which included Latina as a category, and for Latinas whether they consider their ancestry to be Afro-Latina.
7 The survey was in the field between August 20 and August 26, 2020; the median completion time for both Black women and Latinas was 9 min, and the survey was voluntary. We pre-registered our hypotheses with AsPredicted (#49153) before we began data analysis. Table A1 in the Appendix contains descriptive statistics and compares our data with CPS and CCES 2019 benchmarks. Because our data resembles nationally representative samples on characteristics aside from age, we chose not to weight the data. See the online appendix for more information.
8 Because of the low number, we randomly assigned half of the women whose response to the race question included both “Black” and “Latina” to the Black sample and half to the Latina sample. Race/ethnicity was measured with the question “Which of the following racial or ethnic group(s) best describes you? [Check all that apply]”.
9 The question asked, “Do you consider any part of your ancestry or family origin to be Afro-Latino, that is to include both African and Latin American ancestry?” Respondents could answer “yes,” “no,” or “unsure.”
10 As Cohen (Citation2003) has argued: “We must expect all those who study women and politics to consistently address the issues confronted by women of color, challenging the unspoken normative standard of whiteness in this field and making central the interaction of gender, race, and ethnicity in our research” (208).
11 The question read “How important is being a woman of color to you?” with five response options from “not important at all” to “extremely important.”
12 The question read: “Some people believe that when women of color work together in politics, there is a risk that your own group’s unique challenges will be erased. Do you agree or disagree?” (1 to 5, “Agree strongly” to “Disagree strongly”). In his study of “people of color” (POC), Pérez (Citation2020) finds that a group’s specific issues can be adversely affected by working in coalition, diminishing the appeal of a POC identity.
13 The concept of racial resentment was developed by Kinder and Sanders (Citation1996) to study the racial attitudes of whites.
14 The question read: “Have you experienced any kind of discrimination by another person (or people) in the last year? If so, in your opinion, was it because of your: [check all that apply].” Individuals who included gender, race, and/or race and gender – regardless of other categories that were the source of discrimination – were coded as race/gender discrimination in our multivariate analysis with a dummy variable.
15 Education is measured with highest level of educational attainment, from 1 to 7, from no high school to post-graduate education; partisanship is measured from 1 to 3, from Republican to Democrat; and participation is a dummy variable for having voted in the 2016 presidential election.
16 Recent public opinion studies show that measures such as racial resentment tap into different concepts for different racial groups (see Kam and Burge Citation2018; Nunnally and Carter Citation2012; Orey Citation2004; Watts Citation2014). Because our interest is in controlling for anti-Black attitudes in assessing support for WOC candidates, we only include racial resentment in the model of Latina attitudes. Racial resentment is measured with agreement or disagreement with four items and rescaled such that higher values indicate more liberal (less resentful) attitudes.