Sociological Perspectives 1–21 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0731121415580026 spx.sagepub.com Article Race, Skin Tone, and Educational Achievement Maxine S. Thompson 1 and Steve McDonald 1 Abstract Research on skin-tone bias has focused primarily on intraracial inequality with little attention to skin-tone inequality across ethnoracial groups. We engage the debate over the color line by considering the independent, simultaneous, and interactive impacts of skin tone and self-identified race on educational performance. Analyses of National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA) data show significant skin-tone differences in grade point average (GPA) both across and within racial groups, with darker skinned tone individuals receiving significantly lower grades than their lighter skinned tone counterparts. Net of controls, skin-tone differences in GPA are essentially flat among African Americans but are notably stronger among other race/ethnic groups. These findings highlight the interplay between racial categorization and colorism by revealing the categorical disadvantage of racial stigma versus the more fluid colorism boundaries of nonblack groups. Keywords skin tone, race, education, inequality Introduction W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) forecasted the problem of increasing inequity based on race in the twen- tieth century as the “color line” divides between whites and blacks. The color line refers to the social construction of racial boundaries defined chiefly by skin tone and hair texture. In the black/white binary, black group status is defined by the “one-drop rule” (i.e., mixed-race indi- viduals are automatically considered black) and serves as the “other” in the construction of whiteness (Lee and Bean 2003). Contemporary scholars discuss a blurring of the black/white color line resulting from shifts in the ethnoracial demographics of the United States, including the decreasing share of whites, increasing numbers of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and increasing numbers of individuals identifying as multiracial and biracial. Some scholars sug- gest that the resulting homogenization of the experiences of “people of color” could replace the black/white boundary with a white/nonwhite boundary (Lee and Bean 2007). Other researchers, however, note that Asian American and Latino groups view their experiences in opposition to “blackness” and are able to achieve a status closer to whites via economic prosperity (Gans 1999; Lee and Bean 2007; Marrow 2009). The result is a black/nonblack boundary line. Another 1 North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA Corresponding Author: Maxine S. Thompson, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University, Box 8107, 10 Current Drive, Raleigh, NC 27695-8107, USA. Email: maxine_thompson@ncsu.edu 580026SPX XX X 10.1177/0731121415580026Sociological PerspectivesThompson and McDonald research-article 2015 at NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV on July 7, 2015 spx.sagepub.com Downloaded from