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We tend to think of race as a fixed part of our identity, a trait that is set at the moment of conception and stays unchanged for our entire lives. But a new study shows just how fluid our conceptions of race can be.
By following a group of people over almost two decades, Andrew Penner and Aliya Sapersteinfrom the University of California, Irvine found that the way people identify themselves racially, and the way others define them, change over time and are coloured by social status. Their study strongly argues that race is as much a flexible indicator of our social standing as it is a reflection of our biology.
Penner and Saperstein used data from a study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which began in 1979 by interviewing a group of about 12,000 Americans aged 14 to 22. The sample were followed once a year until 1993 and every two years thereafter. Every time, the interviewers classified each person as “White”, “Black” or “Other” and in both 1979 and 2002, the people themselves were asked to...
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