Racialized Prisms: A Randomized Experiment on Families' Perceptions of Schools

Social scientists continue to debate whether families’ avoidance of schools with higher fractions of racial outgroups results from racial animus (a pure race explanation) or their use of racial demographics as a heuristic for school characteristics (a racial proxy explanation). In this article, I propose a new explanation for these patterns. I argue that racial segregation persists, in part, because families perceive school characteristics through a racial prism, whereby their racial biases, awareness of cultural stereotypes, and racial contexts contribute to racialized perceptions of identical schools. To explore this theory, I conduct an experiment with a racially diverse sample of 900 students and parents currently choosing schools, and externally validate these findings by analyzing school application data from the same city. Families provide their perceptions of, and willingness to attend, hypothetical schools that vary in racial composition, academic outcomes, and safety ratings. I find families interpret the same data differently depending on schools’ racial demographics. These racialized perceptions contribute to the effects of school race on families’ preferences. The racial prism concept demonstrates why efforts to improve school quality alone are unlikely to increase integration, and points to the importance of racialized perceptions in explaining the persistence of racial segregation.