Ghoshal surveyed over a thousand Americans and asked a battery of questions designed to examine who adopts which view of racial group membership and under what conditions. His study, “,” was recently published in Social Currents, the official journal of the Southern Sociological Society.

Ghoshal’s research grows out of a tension between different ways of thinking about race. In formal contexts, racial group membership is usually conceived of as binary—one simply is, or is not, part of a group. But informally, nearly all Americans are familiar with claims that people who lack cultural connection or shared experiences, are of mixed descent, look atypical, or do not speak the language associated with their ancestry, are less a part of the group than same-race others.

Ghoshal found that most Americans say that they see race only categorically and claim to reject the idea of varying degrees of membership, but frequently draw on gradational understandings of race in concrete scenarios. For instance, some respondents who said they rejected the idea of degrees of membership nonetheless indicated that they would think of a mixed-ancestry person as “less part of” their racial group than someone whose parents both hailed from that group. The same pattern prevailed for prompts such as comparisons of those who do not speak the language traditionally associated with their ancestry to those who do, or of those who strongly self-identify as part of a group versus those who do not.

The study also found variation in these patterns by age, ideology and race. Americans who came of age after former President Barack Obama’s rise to prominence were more likely to embrace the idea of racial group membership as sometimes continuous, while very liberal and very conservative respondents united in rejecting the idea of gradational belonging more than other groups. Black Americans were especially rejecting of gradational ideas of race in the abstract, but all groups of color were more likely than Whites to embrace this idea when considering concrete examples.

The study contributes to a growing literature on the multidimensionality and complexity of race, especially research that has called attention to variation in treatment and identity based on skin tone, language proficiency and national origin.

Associate Professor of Sociology Raj Ghoshal has published new research that examines how Black-alone and multiracial Black Americans think about Black identity. The article, entitled “,” draws on qualitative and quantitative data from 163 Black American adults.

Ghoshal’s article notes that previous studies had investigated the possibility of divisions emerging between Americans who consider themselves Black-alone and those who identify as Black and at least one other race. These studies frequently assumed that if monoracial and multiracial Black Americans were to see Black identity differently, the division and possible community fracture would concern whether multiracial Black Americans were equal members of the Black community.

Ghoshal’s research finds that monoracial and multiracial Black Americans do indeed see Black identity differently in some notable ways, but that they are not divided on whether multiracial Black Americans are full community members: both groups agree that they are. Instead, the groups differ in how important they think cultural-experiential factors and other people’s racial appraisals are in Black identity. For instance, Black-alone Americans see family experiences with slavery and segregation, as well as what race others judge a person to be, as more important elements of Black identity than do their multiracial counterparts. Strikingly, whether respondents are monoracial or multriacial shapes their views on these questions more strongly than other factors like their political ideology, educational attainment, gender, region, or age.

Ghoshal argues that the fact that on-average differences of opinion between monoracial and multiracial Black Americans about Black identity exist, yet have nothing to do with monoracial and multiracial identity, constitutes the “Black-multiracial identity paradox.” He suggests that this concept helps explain why diverging opinions have not fractured Black identity in the ways prior researchers believed they might.

Ghoshal’s research was supported by ������Ƶ’s Faculty Research and Development. The study appears in the journal , an official publication of the American Sociological Association.

���ܰ������Բ��ٴDz�’���� collects, preserves and presents Alamance County’s African American history. Its exhibits address conditions during slavery and segregation, resistance movements against these forms of oppression, the civil rights era and the movement of some local Black individuals into politics and government from the 1960s onward. Center manager James Shields, Jr., led students on a tour of the site and fielded questions from the class.

Students were enthusiastic about the experience. Kate Rutledge ’27 noted that the center provided local historical information that was valuable to her as an out-of-state student. Jeanne Blau ’27 similarly noted that the center was “cool and unique because it was so specific to the area.” Alex Hartman ’26 called the site “the most intentional museum I have been to.”

The tour was made possible by ������Ƶ’s election grants, which fund opportunities for ������Ƶ students to learn about politics and civic engagement.

The scholars are:

• Jessica Gisclair, associate professor of strategic communications
• Brian Pennington, director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society and professor of religious studies
• Will Pluer, assistant professor of engineering
• Stacey Thomas, assistant professor of nursing

At ������Ƶ, leadership education is not centrally about giving orders or attaining formal power. Rather, ������Ƶ’s approach is relational and collaborative, and focused on helping students develop into ethical, purposive and inclusive leaders and initiative-takers in organizations and society. This approach is consistent with shifts in the field as leadership education has grown beyond its early focus on formal authority to embrace topics like self-knowledge, informal leadership, effective cooperation, group dynamics and conflict resolution, which are relevant for students regardless of what formal roles they may attain.

The scholars program is led by Raj Ghoshal, faculty fellow for leadership education and associate professor of sociology. Applications to be a Leadership Education Faculty Scholar go out every spring.

Ghoshal’s study, recently published in , was the first to consider how racial and ethnic groups vary in how they appraise others’ race. In the 30-minute episode, Ghoshal shared key findings with host Brian Southwell. He noted that Americans are more willing to give some weight to other people’s self-identifications than prior research had realized, but that this willingness is greater when considering Hispanic or Latine identity than for others.

Ghoshal also shared that while all groups place significant weight on people’s ancestry and appearance in assessing their race, Black and Hispanic Americans give greater weight to individual and ancestral experiences in assessing race than white Americans do. Black Americans further place significant emphasis on white American’s own understandings of whiteness, which Ghoshal tied to legacies of how the White/Black “color line” was violently enforced for centuries.

The Measure of Everyday Life is a collaboration by WNCU and RTI International.

Racial appraisals refer to the judgments people make about other people’s race and the grounds they use when doing so, such as ancestry, physical appearance, or culture. These judgments historically underlay slavery, segregation and land expropriation, and continue to shape discrimination and anti-discrimination policy.

Prior research had focused almost exclusively on appraisals by white Americans. Ghoshal conducted an original survey with a nationally representative sample of 1,100 people to examine how Americans of varied races constitute race.

Ghoshal found that people of all races use cues of ancestry and appearance to gauge others’ race, but Black and Hispanic Americans are far more likely than whites to think of experiences as one basis for race. For instance, Black Americans consider not just ancestry and appearance but also whether a person’s family experienced enslavement or segregation as a major factor in appraising Black identity, while Hispanic individuals consider whether a person has lived in a Spanish-speaking context as one factor in Hispanic identity.

He also found that Americans accord weight to self-identification and intra-cultural judgments in assessing some claims. For instance, Americans of all races think that whether a person considers themself Hispanic is an important factor in whether they are Hispanic, and that whether an official tribal entity considers a person to be Native American is similarly important in whether they are indeed Native American. But Americans give less weight to self-identification in deciding white or Black identity.

The goal of Ghoshal’s research is not to establish a “correct” logic of racial appraisals or race concepts, since no such correct logic exists. Rather, it is to understand change and constancy in America’s racial system, with an eye toward eliminating racial hierarchy and injustice. The research was supported by ������Ƶ’s Faculty Research and Development.

The event featured perspectives from computer scientists, geographers, sociologists and philosophers from the U.S. and Canada. Topics addressed included positive and negative impacts of AI on climate change, work organization, social capital and inequality.

In his remarks, Ghoshal suggested that AI can generate efficiency gains but that absent careful regulation, these benefits risk being too narrowly concentrated among the already well-off and powerful. Ghoshal encouraged audience members to “follow the money” — that is, to remember that AI tools are being developed and promoted mainly by powerful, profit-oriented businesses. These tools therefore have significant positive power in cases when profit and overall social well-being coincide, but potential for harm when social good runs contrary to the economic interests of their developers.

Ghoshal gave two examples in which AI-fueled efficiency gains might appear to yield positive results in narrow contexts yet have mixed impacts from a broader perspective. In the first, AI tools might help police better address street crime, yet reduce attention to harms such as white-collar crime more often caused by economically and politically powerful people. In the second, use of AI in medical contexts seemingly helps address U.S. physician scarcity, but locks in a system in which medical associations have used political influence to restrict the supply of doctors and maximize profits, to the detriment of patients.

Ultimately, Ghoshal argued that AI’s positive potentials will be realized only if regulators and citizens devote significant attention to social context, not just technical capabilities.

The scholars are:

• Mustafa Akben, Assistant Professor of Management
• Sirena Hargrove-Leak, Professor of Engineering
• Courtney Liu, Assistant Professor of Dance
• Sandy Marshall, Associate Professor of Geography
• Ben Murphy, Lecturer in English

At ������Ƶ, leadership education is not centrally about giving orders or attaining formal power. Rather, ������Ƶ’s approach is relational and collaborative, and focused on helping students develop into ethical, purposive, and inclusive leaders and initiative-takers in organizations and society. This approach is consistent with shifts in the field as leadership education has grown beyond its early focus on formal authority to embrace topics like self-knowledge, informal leadership, effective cooperation, group dynamics, and conflict resolution, which are relevant for students regardless what formal roles they may attain.

The scholars program is led by Raj Ghoshal, Faculty Fellow for Leadership Education and Associate Professor of Sociology. Applications to be a Leadership Education Faculty Scholar go out every spring.  For more information, email rghoshal@elon.edu.

The episode focused on (with collaborator Michael Gaddis) which compared how young white, Black, Hispanic, Arab, Chinese, and Indian-origin room-seekers fared in the search for shared housing in three American cities. That study and an earlier found significant effects of both race and perceived assimilation on roommate-search outcomes, with members of most non-white groups getting fewer responses than white room-seekers.

Ghoshal also discussed ongoing research on mechanisms of social discrimination and ideas for creating positive change. The 30-minute discussion with host Brian Southwell is available at the and accessible via ITunes, Libsyn, and other players.

The article addresses a debate over whether employers still illegally discriminate when making hiring decisions. Many experiments in the past 15 years have tested for discrimination by creating two fake identities with equal-quality resumes and applying to the same set of job listings with both identities.

In these experiments, known as audit studies, “Steven Smith” and “DeShawn Jackson” might apply to the same 1,000 jobs. Researchers then measure how much interest each resume generates. This line of research has generally found that black Americans need to send out significantly more applications than white Americans to get the same number of callbacks.

However, a 2016 study by economists at the University of Missouri-Columbia argued that these studies used overly stereotypical names to signal race in ways that exaggerated their results. The economists conducted their own study using what they considered more realistic names, and found no difference in employers’ response rates by race. But Ghoshal’s work finds significant flaws in the methodology the economists used.

The 2016 study had used names like “Chloe Jackson” and “Ryan Washington” for their African American job candidates because the last names Jackson and Washington typically belong to black individuals, while “Chloe” and “Ryan” were purportedly race-neutral. Though the economists are correct to see Washington and Jackson as typically black last names, Ghoshal hypothesized that very few Americans would know this and interpret the names as intended. He therefore conducted a 1,050-person national survey which asked respondents to guess the race of people with the exact names the 2016 study had used.

Survey findings show that about 60 percent of people do not interpret the economists’ study names as intended, and frequently see the names as belonging to white individuals. Further, those individuals most likely to make hiring decisions make just as many errors as others. The level of error is sufficient that the 2016 study is not merely invalidated. Rather, its results, properly interpreted, suggest that black job applicants need to send out about 50 percent more applications to have an equal chance of response.

Overall, the findings suggest that racial discrimination remains an important concern that individuals, employers, and government should address.

The research was supported by ������Ƶ’s Faculty Research & Development.