The Role of Cultural Identities with Color Evasiveness and Racist Attitudes

Understanding attitudes perpetuating racism and racist systems is an essential avenue of research (Loyd & Gaither, 2018). In the modern-day context, racism often takes the form of blaming disparities not on systems of inequity and oppression but on individuals themselves (Keum et al., 2018). In contrast, colorblindness or color evasiveness is the belief that racism and racist ideology do not exist or matter (Keum et al., 2018). Racism results in people actively discriminating against minoritized populations, and color evasiveness disregards the issue. Prior research has indicated that racial identity is associated with racist attitudes among non-Hispanic Whites (Pope-Davis & Ottavi, 1994). Still, these studies have primarily utilized a unidimensional conceptualization of racial identity. This gap is problematic because ethnic/racial identity (ERI) is a multidimensional construct that captures how individuals navigate their attitudes and feelings about their ethnic/racial (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014)). In addition, past research has ignored U.S. identity (USI) development, another critical component of one’s cultural identity (Meca et al., 2023). Addressing this gap, the proposed study will utilize a sample of 428 college students (74.9% female, Mage=20.58, SD=2.37) to examine the unique association between dimensions of ERI and USI with color evasiveness and racist ideology among non-Hispanic White college students utilizing two separate linear regressions were estimated to determine the associations between dimensions of ERI and USI with Racism and color evasiveness.