The intersecting associations between race and ethnicity, skin color, and perceived unfair treatment by police

Abstract

This study examines the association between self-identified race and ethnicity, perceived skin color, and ever being unfairly stopped, searched, or questioned by police among a nationally representative sample of Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and other groups. Results show that Non-Latino Blacks and Latinos are more likely to experience unfair police treatment compared with non-Latino Whites. Respondents with medium brown, dark brown, or black skin tones are more likely to report unfair treatment by police than those with white skin. Darker skin is consequential within Latinos, although Black respondents (regardless of color) are among those most likely to experience unfair police treatment.

Keywords:

• Add health
• race and ethnicity
• skin color
• unfair police treatment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Add Health asked respondents if they were of Hispanic or Spanish/Latino origin. See Martínez and Gonzalez (2021) for a discussion on the terms Hispanic and Latino.

2 The current study does not examine perceived racial classification because Add Health interviewers did not report their perception of respondents’ ethnicity. Using perceived race may be problematic because racial misclassification is higher among Latino groups (Vargas & Stainback, 2016). Since skin color is a primary characteristic used to assess others’ race and ethnicity (Brown et al., 1998), and it is available for all racial and ethnic groups in Add Health, we argue that perceived skin color is a better option for examining the multidimensional nature of race and ethnicity than perceived race in these data.

3 To ensure that this sampling restriction was not affecting the overall pattern of results, we also examined all of our models using the full sample of approximately 10,000 respondents. The results were substantively similar to what is presented here.

Additional information

Funding

These questions are from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this project.

Notes on contributors

Jessica G. Finkeldey

Jessica Finkeldey, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice in the Sociocultural and Justice Sciences Department at the State University of New York at Fredonia. As a whole, her research examines predictors of antisocial behavior and contact with the criminal justice system as well as the collateral consequences of contact with the justice system.

Christopher R. Dennison

Christopher R. Dennison, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His research examines the effects of criminal justice system contact as well as how postsecondary educational experience and attainments influence crime, substance use, and mental health across the life course. His most recent project examines the effect of adult children’s educational attainments on parents’ health later in life.

Shiyue Cui

Shiyue Cui is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research focuses on intersections of race and ethnicity, gender, citizenship, and social inequality. Her current research examines the association between criminal justice system contact and individuals’ well-being in later life.