Is Race Reflected by Your Outfit?

THE GIST Our perception of race is altered by the clothing people wear.

THE SOURCE “Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception,” by Jonathan B.

Freeman, Andrew M. Penner, Aliya Saperstein, Matthias Scheutz and Nalini Ambady, published

in PLoS ONE.

MICHAEL JACKSON, a racially ambiguous person if ever there were one, sang, “It doesn‟t

matter if you‟re black or white.” If only matters were so simple.

According to a new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Tufts, Stanford and

the University of California, Irvine, people judge other people‟s race using cues that extend well

beyond skin color and facial features. “Looking white” or “looking black” is freighted with

cultural perceptions and social prejudice.

The study involved experiments in which participants were asked to determine the race of

different faces, which were scaled in 13 skin tones along a spectrum from black to white. In

some cases, the person was shown with a business suit on; in others, with a blue-collar janitorial

outfit. The question was whether people wearing janitor attire would more likely be viewed as

black. The answer: Yes.

Using a mouse-tracking analysis, researchers found that even when users decided a man dressed

as a janitor was white, the speed and path in which they moved their mouse to the “white” button

was slower and veered closer toward the “black” button than when the same man was dressed in

a business suit. The more racially ambiguous the face, the more pronounced the results.

“We tend to think that our perception of a face depends on their facial features, but what we

found is that the cues around the face and the stereotypes we bring to the table influences our

perception of race,” said the lead author, Jonathan B. Freeman, a doctoral candidate in

psychology at Tufts.

Social status may not be the only variable informing our perceptions of a person‟s race.

“Although we have suggested that the effects of contextual cues on race categorization were

driven by differences in the social status of occupations,” the study says, “it is possible that they

were driven by other differences related to occupations, such as stereotypes of intelligence, pay,

or who does „dirty work.‟ ”

Of course, there‟s the question of whose perceptions are being judged. The participants, all

undergraduates, were overwhelmingly white. There were some Asians and South Asians and one

person who self-identified as biracial, but there were no African-Americans or Hispanics, a

reflection of the university population that volunteered to participate. The researchers are

planning a follow-up study that will examine whether black or multiracial individuals perceive

race in a similar way, Mr. Freeman said.

But Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard, says the color of the participants isn‟t

the only problem with the study. Americans, he said, unlike most cultures, use a hypodescent

rule, in which one drop of black blood makes a person black. (By contrast, in Brazil, more than

125 terms are commonly used to describe racial distinctions.)

“The researchers preordained the outcome by forcing people to choose between two categories,”

Dr. Patterson said. Hispanic or West Indian respondents in particular would see other choices

missing. “In Jamaica, where I‟m from, if we see a person of color wearing peasant clothing, we

have our own special term for him: a boogu yagga.” Clearly, the cultural perception of race is far

from being a black and white issue.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 16, 2011, on page ST6 of the New York edition

with the headline: Is Race Reflected By Your Outfit?.