There are two main ways that people categorize racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial individuals. The first is the “one-drop rule” or hypodescent, where racially ambiguous people are seen as belonging to the lower-status racial group (for example, Black/White Biracial faces are categorized as Black). The second is the “ingroup overexclusion effect,” where racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a noticeable outgroup, no matter what that group’s status is. Without studying diverse groups of children, we don’t know when these patterns start.
In the first study, White, Black, and Biracial children (ages 3 to 7) and their parents were tested to see how their racial group and social environment influenced their face categorization biases. To clearly test the one-drop rule and ingroup overexclusion, White participants came from mostly White neighborhoods, Black participants from mostly Black neighborhoods, and Biracial participants from more diverse neighborhoods. The second study tried to replicate the parent results with a different group of White, Black, Black/White Biracial, and Asian adults.
The results suggest that the ingroup overexclusion effect is present early in childhood and continues into adulthood. Categorization was also strongly linked to the context of the parents, showing a possible way that ingroup overexclusion develops.
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Both children and adults, whether White, Black, or racially diverse Biracial, tended to categorize racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial faces as belonging to an outgroup, even if that outgroup was White. This finding goes against most previous research that suggests racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial people are more often categorized as Black. The way children categorized faces was similar to their parents, but it wasn’t influenced by socialization beyond what the parents’ categorizations showed. Children showed similar patterns of categorization across different types of measurements.
