Ideological Whitening: does skintone shape colour-blind ideology adherence for Latina/os?

ABSTRACT

Prominent theories of the US racial order contend that phenotypically light Latina/os will elevate to an honorary White category as a result of their socio-economic advantages over darker Latina/os. Accordingly, light Latina/os are presumed to adopt colour-blind racial ideology to cement their elevated racial status. This study is among the first to examine the relationship between skintone and Latina/os’ colour-blind ideology adherence with nationally representative data. I examine these relationships with data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, and test the robustness of findings across two alternative national data sets: the 2014 General Social Survey, and the 2006 Latino National Survey. Across data sets, different measurement approaches, and time periods, this study finds no evidence that skintone shapes Latina/os’ levels of colour-blind ideology adherence. The study concludes by considering why the racial ideology of light Latina/os is non-concordant with their elevated socio-economic status in relation to darker Latina/os.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinos
• skin colour
• honorary White
• race
• colour-blind ideology
• Whitening

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Using the “mi impute” program in Stata 11.0, I created twenty data imputations, each with a random error component for missing values derived from all independent variables in the full statistical model. Developing twenty unique data sets with all original observed values, this procedure inputs imputed values for each instance of missing data. In accord with von Hippel (2007), all cases with imputed dependent variables are deleted prior to statistical analyses. Additionally, I do not impute values for cases that are systematically missing. Household income had the highest level of missingness at 12 per cent.

2 For example, Vargas and Stainback (2016) found that over 90 per cent of Latina/os sampled in PALS report dark (brown or Black) eyes. Moreover, Vargas (2015) found that Latina/os with light eyes are nearly five times more likely to report that they are perceived racially as White than their darker eyed counterparts. Eye colour, then, is a marker of racialization, and light eyes a common marker of Whiteness with the potential to shape how Latina/os experience and conceptualize race and racism.