Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Racial minorities will soon outnumber white Americans in the U.S. Prior research suggests that this demographic shift is likely to increase white peoples’ feelings of threat and anti-minority discrimination. But might this demographic shift also alter who is considered a minority in the first place? We propose that the impending “majority-minority” shift in the U.S., and subsequent threats to white status, could lead white people to perceive mixed-race faces as more minority than white. In an initial correlational study, white participants who self-reported greater status threat perceived mixed-race faces as more Latino than white (Study 1). As compared to those in a control condition, white participants in Studies 2-5 who read about the U.S. demographic shift reported greater status threat and exhibited reduced perceptual thresholds for categorizing mixed-race faces as Latino, Black, and “not white.” A mediation analysis across studies indicated that the status threat white participants experienced from the demographic shift may have lowered their threshold for seeing mixed-race faces as minorities. In addition to increasing anti-minority discrimination as previous research has shown, our results indicate that demographic changes may also shift race perception to increase the number of people who are seen as minorities and therefore more vulnerable to discrimination—a practice historically used to preserve white status in the American racial hierarchy.