ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors extend the standard sociological account of US racial inequality by incorporating recent research from the fields of race and ethnicity and social psychology. They demonstrate that treating race as a fixed characteristic not only oversimplifies the relationship between race and social status, it also obscures the role that the racial fluidity of individual’s plays in stabilizing the "social invention" that is race in the United States. Individual-level racial fluidity would serve to maintain existing group boundaries and the hierarchy of social positions they imply. Changes in status that are stereotype inconsistent drive racial fluidity, whereas stereotype consistent shifts in status reinforce racial stability. If some Americans who experience an increase in status are "whitened" as a result of their upward mobility, and some who experience downward mobility are "darkened," these changes serve to reinforce both racial inequality and existing stereotypes.
