Analytic racecraft: Race-based averages create illusory group differences in perceptions of racism.

Abstract

Research practices used by social scientists to understand and dismantle the psychological foundations that uphold racist hierarchies can backfire when they rely on racecraft. Racecraft ideology assumes the reality of race(s), an assumption that shapes study designs and inferences to the detriment of theoretical and practical goals. I showcase how racecraft manifests in studies seeking to quantify how perceptions of sociopolitical stimuli differ across racialized perceivers (e.g., black, white, latinx). The typical analysis for quantifying perceptions focuses on comparing group averages, which assumes the existence of discrete "races" whose perceptions can be sufficiently summarized by averages. Across three studies, I used variance component analyses on racism ratings of anti-immigrant tweets from differently racialized perceivers (N = 1,211) to show there was much larger disagreement than agreement within race categories, even when there were average differences in perceptions across race categories. This analysis shows how analytic practices can bolster different assumptions about the nature of race, some of which reify the illusion that race categories are stable cohesive groups. Researchers can improve their analytic inferences and avoid producing race-reifying caricatures of peoples' perceptions by adding variance mapping to their toolkits and attending to racialization as a dynamic process-needed improvements within the psychological study of race and racism, group-based beliefs, and antiracist research endeavors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).