Critical ‘street race’ praxis: advancing the measurement of racial discrimination among diverse Latinx communities in the U.S

ABSTRACT

Research demonstrates a causal link between increased exposure to racial discrimination and adverse health outcomes among diverse racial and ethnic populations in the U.S. However, most research on Latinx communities overlooks how discrimination varies according to individual accounts of how their race is perceived by others. To address this gap, our study draws from critical race theory to analyze a new multi-dimensional measure of racial status – ‘street race’ and its association with discrimination experiences. We analyzed data from the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigration Survey (n = 1,493). Our main dependent variables are experiences of everyday discrimination and our explanatory variables are five mutually exclusive categories of ‘street race.’ We estimated a series of logistic regression models, which disaggregated the ‘street race’ measure, to better understand everyday discrimination experiences across street race categories. We found that Latinxs who are racialized on the street as Black or as Arab/Middle-Eastern relative to White were more likely to have experienced discrimination because of their race/ethnicity. They were also more likely to have experienced discrimination in the employment domain, by police, in the housing market, as consumers in shops or restaurants, and while receiving medical care. Employing a critical race approach, our study expands the conceptual measurement of discrimination to incorporate a more nuanced approach that captures interpersonal racism based on ‘street race.’ Further research will benefit from employing our ‘Critical Street-Race’ theory for developing equity-focused multi-level interventions at the interpersonal, community, and policy levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Street race
• critical race theory
• Latino/a/x
• racism
• discrimination
• population health

Acknowledgements

The Latino National Health and Immigration Survey is supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico. The project described is supported, in part, by an NICHD training grant to the University of Wisconsin–Madison (grant number T32HD049302). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institutes of Health, or the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Data deposition

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon request.

Notes

1. Other than direct citations, this study utilizes the term ‘Latinx’, which encompasses multiple aspects of identity that are subverted within gendered terms such as ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [T32HD049302]; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy.