In recent years, the phrase “people of color” has been incorporated into the American lexicon. While the phrase serves to signal similarities in experiences among non-White people, there has been relatively little scholarly exploration thus far to highlight the nuances and power potentially associated with this group. In Diversity's Child, Efrén Pérez undertakes an impressive and thorough political exploration of people of color as both a social and political group. Drawing from interdisciplinary literatures in psychology, sociology, and political science, Pérez creates a theoretical framework for understanding whether, how, and when people of color may identify as such. He subsequently examines the conditions under which this identity is (or is not) politically potent.
The clear and digestible prose throughout the manuscript skillfully walks readers through the relevant theory, expectations, and challenges associated with establishing people of color as a new identity. The first half of the book focuses on conceptualizing people of color identity (PoC identity) and laying out the foundation for understanding people of color as a group. Given growing ethnoracial diversity in the United States, there is reason to believe that people of color might coalesce under this umbrella category. Importantly, Pérez argues that PoC identity is distinct from other identities that minoritized groups hold: “PoC ID is not simply a synonym for one's attachment to a specific racial or ethnic group, such as being African American, Asian American, or Latino. … it encapsulates all of these distinct communities” (p. 67). In this view, the people of color label serves as a broader category within which other ethnoracial identity groups are nested.
Drawing from literatures on social identity theory, inter-group dynamics, and racial identities and politics, Pérez lays out the expectations associated with a potential PoC identity. Relying on 25 in-depth interviews with self-identified people of color of varying demographic backgrounds, readers are then given a broader sense of what factors contribute to (and detract from) a potentially shared group identity among people of color. As with any social group, though, attachment to the group is not uniform across all group members. In what will undoubtedly soon come to be adopted by many scholars, Pérez develops a set of measures to assess the levels of PoC identity and examines the distribution of attachment to this group in Chapter 4. To this end, he demonstrates that a sense of PoC identity exists across minoritized groups and is not simply a reflection of one's own racial group attachment or other identities (e.g., national identity).
In the second half of the book, Pérez conducts a series of experiments to examine the conditions under which PoC identity can influence social or political perceptions. Through a clever experiment regarding a White waiter speaking rudely to a non-White couple, we learn that people of color react just as strongly and negatively to reading about this situation when the couple is of their own shared ethnoracial background as when the couple belongs to another ethnoracial group. In Chapter 6, Pérez turns to an examination of the circumstances in which PoC identity is politicized. Here, the goal is to examine whether exposure to information about a threat to people of color will evoke a reaction among group members. Through another series of experiments, we learn that those who strongly identify as people of color in both the control and treatment groups share similar feelings and hold comparable policy views. This suggests that PoC identity is already salient to individuals who identify strongly as people of color absent efforts to further prime this identity. Given the unique histories of each respective group falling under the PoC umbrella category, however, there are reasons to expect fractures may occur. Pérez spends the final empirical chapter examining what happens when people of color are reminded of the distinctiveness of their respective ethnoracial in-group through another well-designed series of experiments. Ultimately, the takeaway is that the potential for political cohesion and power among people of color depends on perceptions of similarities versus differences across the constituent groups.
Overall, Diversity's Child is a tour de force that presents complex topics and ideas to readers in an impressively accessible fashion. Pérez should be applauded for his extensive efforts toward establishing a body of evidence that PoC identity is a meaningful social and political identity that scholars of American politics should be theorizing and studying with regularity. Apart from the specific focus on people of color as an identity, the framework for this book also has obvious applicability toward understanding identities more broadly—e.g., including pan-ethnic or pan-racial identities among Latinos or Asian Americans. As with any good book, it will spark many questions for readers. One of the biggest questions I was left with involved the tension between group cohesion and fracture for people of color and what this means for the (political) future of this group. For example, given the nature of segregated social spheres, does real-world exposure to social media, news media, and/or political messaging regularly serve to undermine potential political solidarity among people of color? Alternatively, is there a desire to present a united front and, in turn, increase the potential political power of this group among many members—perhaps as was evidenced in the sustained Summer 2020 protests? It would be valuable to get a broader sense through more surveys or other data sources (e.g., interviews, content analyses, Twitter data) of how people of color are thinking, talking, and organizing around this identity. In terms of downstream behavior, it would be valuable to know if (and when) members of this group are willing to join organizations, participate in protests, and/or problem-solve in community forums alongside other people of color. Fortunately for scholars of political psychology, political behavior, race and politics, and American politics more broadly, a body of research will surely emerge from the solid foundation laid by Pérez to continue answering these questions, and more, throughout the coming years.
