| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation introduces a re-conceptualization of differential racialization to capture how boundaries of group membership and community shift across various contexts, thereby producing racialized inequality within, and not merely between, existing monolithic racial categories. First, it articulates a theoretical re-conceptualization of differential racialization that extends its meaning beyond its traditional use in Critical Race Theory scholarship. As such, it underscores not only how assumptions attached to racialized groups change over time, but also who gets racialized under those labels in the first place. In particular, it outlines the key tenets of a re-conceptualized differential racialization. Second, this dissertation illustrates the utility of the differential racialization lens in explaining empirically observable macro-level inequalities between groups subsumed under a common racial label. Specifically, it utilizes a differential racialization framework to study the trends in health inequality between the three largest groups of Asian descent in the United States—Chinese, Asian Indians, and Filipinos. Formal demographic analyses reveal widening health outcomes between Chinese, Asian Indians, and Filipinos, offering suggestive evidence of differential racialization at work among them. Lastly, it reveals how differential racialization is experienced by individuals during social interactions and how it shapes how they navigate such interactions. By analyzing data from interviews with 36 young adults of Asian descent from across the United States, I examined how inclusion or exclusion from the boundaries of ‘Asian-ness’ shaped how young adults experienced and navigated police encounters. I found that the differential racialization of these young adults led to divergent policing experiences via status construction. How individuals interact with each other is partly shaped by their perceived racial-ethnic status. However, how one’s racial-ethnic status is classified by others does not necessarily follow the ethno-racial pentagon. Taken together, this dissertation is a crucial step towards clarifying how the meanings of race and racial categories vary across spatial and temporal contexts. Ultimately, this project extends the theoretical discourse on racialization and boundary formation. The re-conceptualized differential racialization framework that I established in this project offers a new perspective through which we can understand the dynamic processes that produce and reproduce social inequality | |
