Policing the Boundaries of Blackness: How Black and White Americans Evaluate Racial Self-Identifications¹

How do people assess the authenticity and legitimacy of another person’s racial self-identification? This study explores the racial conceptions held by both Black and White Americans as they decide who they believe can—and cannot—self-identify as Black across a range of contexts. We examine how a person’s responses compare to their perceptions of how other Americans evaluate racial claims. Using a series of survey experiments, we find that respondents privilege the information contained in genetic ancestry tests over and above other attributes, such as self-identification. We do not observe meaningful differences by race in the treatment effects, illustrating the shared nature of these schemas. However, we find a discordance between respondents’ beliefs and their perceptions of how other Americans would respond in similar settings, suggesting that the attributes people themselves use in both classifications and to judge authenticity differ from their perceptions of the broader social “rules” regarding race.