Description:

Title: Toward a New Understanding of Racial Position

Abstract: Racial and ethnic groups of color have been Othered in U.S. society, but not in uniform ways. Our work integrates a dimension of cultural foreignness along with the more commonly studied dimension of perceived status to suggest that different racial and ethnic groups face qualitatively different experiences of discrimination in the U.S. (Zou & Cheryan, 2017). In this talk, I will draw upon this Racial Position Model and share our new work on its implications for understanding discrimination and intraminority relations. We find, using controlled laboratory experiments and employment discrimination cases, that racial and ethnic minority groups face different forms of discrimination in the labor market. We also find that creating intraminority solidarity may at times require acknowledging differences between groups. Systematically integrating a dimension of cultural foreignness gives us insight into the differing experiences of racial and ethnic minority groups and how to create solidarity between them.