Separate from Class? Toward a Theory of Race as Resource Signal
Abstract
Abstract In the study of U.S. inequality, social scientists have long sought to tease apart the “effect of race” from the “effect of class” in our analyses. In studies of how individuals make evaluations of the social world, for instance, researchers have asked whether race or class demography shape individual perceptions, how each matters independent of the other, and ultimately which matters more. While this scientific practice is widespread, what I term the race-versus-class paradigm is only one way to analyze the relationship between race and class. The materialist tradition offers a competing approach, asking not how race matters independent of class, but how racism operates through structural, material conditions. To better explain the relationship between “race” and “class” in how individuals evaluate the social world, this paper proposes a theory of race as resource signal. In this alternative approach, race and class are interwoven, mutually constitutive, and dialectically constructed concepts unable to be meaningfully teased apart. I trace the differences in the two approaches through an empirical application, asking how individuals evaluate school quality based on neighborhood race and class demography in a video experiment.
Metadata is indexed. Open-access discovery has not completed for this record yet.
No local PDF is available.
GROBID Extracted text; discontinued.
This text is generated from TEI extraction for accessibility, search, and TTS. Formulas, tables, figures, page layout, and references may not perfectly match the original PDF.
No accessible text representation is available. The text extraction service has been discontinued for the time being. If you require this service, for accessibility or any other reason, please submit an issue/request on this page.
Metadata
Issues
No public issues have been filed for this DOI.
Submit an issue
Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-000-8800287 |