Students’ Utilitarian Strategies in Avoiding Anticipated Prejudice (N=383)
“Literature does not reveal the extent to which [minorities] change their behavior to avoid experiencing discrimination’’ (Blank et al., 2004; see Pager & Pedulla, 2015)” (Kang et al., 2016).
☆ Students with an East Asian last name (13%) were descriptively more likely than all other respondents (6.9%) to report using a nickname on resumes/ job applications as opposed to their real name.
☆ Female students (24.7%) are more likely than male students (7.8%) to use skin tone lightening filters before posting pictures on social media, χ2(1, N = 383) = 9.94, p=.002.
☆ Female students (20.4%) were more likely than male students (7.8%) to report that they dressed in masculine ways to avoid sexism in male-dominated classrooms & jobs, χ2(1, N = 383) = 15.77, p<.001.
☆ Female students (23.9%) were more likely than male students (12.5%) to report that they avoid bringing cultural meals to eat at work so people stop asking what they’re eating, χ2(1, N = 383) = 6.92, p=.009.
☆ Male students (39.1%) were more likely than female students (25.5%) to report asking for receipts in case they were asked for proof of legal purchase, χ2(1, N = 383) = 7.47, p=.006.
☆ Students with an East Asian last name (21.8%) & Indian last name (35.3%) were more likely than all other monoracial respondents (0–11.5%) to report trying to hide their accent, χ2(4, N = 303) = 15.96, p=.003.
Colorism Sidenotes
Colorism is 5000 Years Old — Sandra Wilde et al., 2014
Selection on skin pigmentation occurred in the last 5,000 years (Wilde et al., 2014 — Pigmentation; Mathieson & Mathieson, 2018).
“Our results provide direct evidence that strong selection favoring lighter skin, hair, & eye pigmentation has been operating in European populations over the last 5,000 years.
Geographic variation in many functional skin pigmentation gene polymorphisms (Norton et al., 2007), & lighter skin pigmentation more generally, correlate strongly with distance from the equator in long-established populations, suggesting that selective pressure also occurred along a latitudinal gradient.
Once lighter hair and eye pigmentation phenotypes reached appreciable frequencies in European populations, these novel traits may have continued to be preferred as indicators of group membership, facilitating assortative mating.
Assortative mating based on coloration is common in vertebrates (Hofreiter & Schöneberg, 2010), and
skin pigmentation has been observed as a criterion for endogamy in modern human populations (Banerjee, 1985; Roberts & Kahlon, 1972).
In addition, there is some evidence that lighter iris colors, because of their recessive mode of inheritance, may be preferred by males in assortative mating regimes to improve paternity confidence (Laeng et al., 2007).
[Laeng B, Mathisen R, Johnsen J-A (2007) Why do blue-eyed men prefer women with the same eye color? Behav Ecol Sociobiol 61(3):371–384.]
[Norton HL, et al. (2007) Genetic evidence for the convergent evolution of light skin in Europeans and East Asians. Mol Biol Evol 24(3):710–722.]