American International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (AIJHSS)

The question of why individuals value identities like their race is contested terrain. Scholars in the Reflected Appraisals tradition have famously argued that members of racial and other minority groups experience identity devaluation and related stress (Hacker, 1992; Hoff-Sommers, 2000; Harris, 1993; Meyer, 1995; McIntyre, 2002; Tatum, 1997) and “like” their identities less in empirical terms than members of majority groups (Hacker, 1995; Harris, 1993). This argument has been advanced often in both domestic and multi-national contexts (Spinner-Halev & Theiss-Morse, 2003), but fairly few rigorous quantitative tests of it seem to have ever been conducted (but see Charles, 2003). This paper involves an empirical test of the hypothesis that membership in a minority racial in-group predicts lowered valuation of in-group identity. I employ ordinal and List Experiment surveys to determine whether members of several minority groups (Blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, Natives) value their identities less than whites in terms of (1) placing lower monetary values upon them and (2) being hypothetically more willing to change them. My hypothesis is that identity valuation will not be status dependent: minority status will not correlate to a statistically significant degree with lowered identity valuation, because development of oppositional identities allows minorities to value themselves despite potential discrimination (Simein, 2005; Stern, 1995). This thesis was partly but not totally confirmed. Racial minority status was in fact a significant positive predictor of racial identity valuation during t-tests, linear regressions, and logistic regressions but a negative predictor of valuation during List Experiment analysis. List Experiment results also indicate that whites may be less honest about their levels of in-group identification than minorities.