Review Article
Open Access
The Fluidity of Racial Classifications
- Lauren Davenport1
- View Affiliations and Author NotesHide Affiliations and Author NotesDepartment of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA; email:[email protected]
- Vol. 23:221-240(Volume publication date May 2020)
- First published as a Review in Advance onDecember 23, 2019
- Copyright © 2020 by Annual Reviews.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third party material in this article for license information.
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Lauren Davenport. 2020. The Fluidity of Racial Classifications.Annual Review Political Science.23:221-240.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-060418-042801
Abstract
In this article, I review the social science literature on racial fluidity, the idea that race is flexible and impermanent. I trace the ongoing evolution of racial classifications and boundaries in the United States and Latin America, two regions that share a history of European colonization, slavery, and high levels of race mixing but that have espoused very different racial ideologies. Traditionally, for many groups in the United States, race was seen as unchangeable and determined by ancestry; in contrast, parts of Latin America have lacked strict classification rules and embraced race mixing. However, recent research has shown that race in the United States can change across time and context, particularly for populations socially defined as more ambiguous, while some Latin American racial boundaries are becoming more stringent. I argue that the fluidity of race has redefined our understanding of racial identities, and propose several directions for future political science scholarship that bridges disciplines and methodological approaches.





