“They Have Black in Their Blood”: Exploring How Genetic Ancestry Tests Affect Racial Classifications and Evaluations

How do genetic ancestry tests (GATs) affect Black Americans’ beliefs about when others should – or should not – identify as Black? Using two nationally representative survey experiments (n=3,100 and n=3489) that integrate causal inference with computational text analysis, we disentangle the effects of GAT results, context, and prior identification on Black Americans’ racial classification and evaluation logics. While racial classifications – categorizing another person into one racial category or another – capture important information about how racial boundaries are drawn, the process through which these classifications are made and narrated – which we term racial evaluation – also provides essential details about the underlying cognitive and discursive practices that shape how people ‘do’ race.

We find that respondents have an increased likelihood of approving of a person’s decision to identify as Black and classifying them as Black if that person has higher levels of GAT-measured Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Nonetheless, respondents tend to classify even individuals with low levels of such ancestry as Black. We also identify meaningful gaps between the responses made by respondents themselves and their perception of the typical classification response that would be made by members of their own racial group, a pattern that we also find among White Americans in a comparison sample. These results suggest broad pluralistic ignorance towards the social rules governing racialization and legitimacy.

Further, free text responses reveal a range of strategies used to evaluate another’s self-identification. However, the characteristics that affect evaluations differ from those that affect classifications; respondents selectively integrate different sources of information, including GAT results, via a dual classification and evaluation process which we term racial contextualism. In doing so, we bridge literatures on dual processes of thinking and culture with literatures on racial boundary-making, illustrating the cognitive and deliberative dimensions that shape perceptions of race.