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Though mixed-race couples still report rudeness and outright hostility from strangers—there are plenty of places in this country where they would be reasonably wary of walking in public hand in hand—I would wager that almost as many have experienced the bizarre enthusiasm of strangers who marvel, “Your babies will be so beautiful.” You could be the ugliest man and woman in the world, but if you are from distinctly different races, Americans will chase you down the street to describe the color they imagine your babies will be, perhaps invoking the name of a creamy coffee drink or citing a beautiful cousin of a cousin who has slanted eyes that are green. Politically correct people who would never make normative statements about the beauty of one race over another nevertheless feel liberated to adjudicate physical supremacy when the subjects are composed of multiple socially constructed groups. “Asian and white is my favorite,” a blonde soccer mom at my middle school told me once, as though my parents’ decision to marry and have kids was an ingenuity akin to the creation of a Labradoodle. She meant well, of course, even as she fetishized a preteen directly to her face. Today, I would be tempted to respond, “Really? I kind of like Somali-Inuit-Peruvian better,” though it may be worth noting that I’m a lot brattier about the subject when I’m talking to white people. Some elements of beauty appear to be universal. Symmetry and unblemished skin, for instance, are attractive across cultures, likely as a measure of health. Some believe that eye-size preference has biological underpinnings, too; large eyes, particularly in women, are a mark of youthfulness and thus fertility. Still, when Japan sent a delegation of samurai to the United States in 1860 after centuries of isolation, Survival of the Prettiest author Nancy Etcoff reports that the warriors said it was “disheartening” to discover American women had “dogs’ eyes.” Which makes you think that, once you’ve reached the point where beauty ideals are shaped by social power, figuring out the origin of beauty may be beside the point. (Does the fact that hormonal changes at puberty tend to make women paler and men darker, which some use to explain preferences for lighter pigmentation, make discussions of skin color easier or harder?) And while it’s tempting to see new multicultural beauty ideals as democratic in some way, we’re still talking about the often cruel happenstance of being born into a body and a face that will be read as symbols, and the sometimes desperate ways people cope with that. Around the same time that Kwan flew to Hawaii to learn blepharoplasty from Flowers, Dr. Michelle Yagoda flew to Japan’s Otsuka Academy to learn an incisionless eyelid-creasing technique. a job training program. Race, however, is commonly understood as an immutable characteristic. Second, race is “assigned” before most other variables; that is, people are typically categorized into one race or another from birth. Considering effects of race along with factors that follow birth, such as educational attainment or class, risks introducing post-treatment bias. Thus, making statements about the causal effect of race or race-based variables has been widely thought to be a misguided enterprise.1 Partly in response, some social scientists studying causal effects of race and ethnicity have adopted narrower experimental manipulations, such as varying the “racial soundingness” of a name on a resume, to approximate random assignment of seemingly immutable characteristics (Bertrand & Mullainathan 2004). Although these techniques help identify causal effects of something associated with race, they also introduce additional challenges of definition and measurement. Is race an immutable characteristic if elements of race can be manipulated? Are traits like “racial soundingness” the same as race? If not, how do those traits map to other aspects of race or to broader racial categories? At the heart of these methodological puzzles is an even older debate as to the nature of race. Is race immutable, as a primordialist or essentialist framework suggests? Or is a constructivist framework in which race is conceptualized as a complex, socially constructed identity with many mutable facets a more useful methodological starting point? In this article, we address these questions and propose a new framework for studying the impact of race, ethnicity, and other seemingly immutable characteristics. Building on the work of both constructivist and quantitative scholars, we propose that, in experimental or empirical contexts, race should be understood as a composite variable or “bundle of sticks.” Conceptualizing race and ethnicity in constructivist terms allows race to be disaggregated into constitutive elements, some of which can be manipulated experimentally or changed through other types of interventions. In many cases, this approach resolves the conflict between the potential outcomes framework of causal inference and seemingly immutable characteristics such as race, gender, and sexual 1Although race is often defined as a biological inheritance and ethnicity as a cultural inheritance, we use “race” and “race and ethnicity” interchangeably for four reasons. First, many groups, such as US Hispanics, are categorized as a racial group in some contexts and as an ethnic group in others. Second, within social science, the term of choice often varies by region and subdiscipline. For example, the term ethnic minorities is used by many European social scientists to refer to groups that would be considered racial minorities within the United States. Similarly, many scholars of comparative politics use ethnicity as an umbrella term for categories that include race. Third, epigenetics suggests that biological, environmental, and cultural influences interact in ways that can make drawing clean lines between biology and culture challenging. Fourth, in many studies, culturally determined traits are used to estimate effects of race. See Chandra (2006) for an overview of the challenges associated with defining and classifying ethnic identity. 500 Sen · Wasow Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2016.19:499-522. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by Harvard University on 05/12/16. For personal use only. orientation.2 This approach is also useful for research focused on descriptive, observational, or correlational analyses. Thinking about race as having constituent parts can clarify what precisely is being estimated when scholars attempt to understand how race and ethnicity operate in the world. Our approach sheds light on the mechanisms at play and illuminates paths for potential policy interventions. We illustrate this way of thinking about race by delineating two kinds of research designs: (a) studies that measure the effect of exposing an individual or institution to some racial or ethnic signal and (b) studies that attempt to measure the effect of some manipulable element of race that varies within a single group.3 In short, our approach reconciles race and causation for many types of research and unifies a diverse body of past research into two coherent methods that can be applied to future scholarship. This article proceeds as follows. First, we review theories of race developed by existing scholarship. We then briefly explain the potential outcomes framework, lay out the key problems of making causal inferences within the “immutable characteristics” framework, and show how theorizing and operationalizing race differently can resolve many of these problems. Finally, we tie these threads together into a cohesive framework that highlights two research designs: exposure studies and within-group studies. Throughout, we point to successful social science research to clarify how race-based variables can—and cannot—be used by applied researchers working to extract causal inferences from experimental and observational studies. THEORIES OF RACE How race is defined determines how it can be operationalized in empirical or quantitative research. Two theories of race have dominated prior scholarship: essentialism and constructivism.
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