Formation and persistence of oppositional identities

Abstract

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why this behavior may persist over time. We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional culture in the minority group cannot always be sustained in equilibrium. Indeed, because the size of the majority group is larger, there is an “imposed” process of exposition to role models from the majority group that favors the diffusion of mainstream values in the minority community. In spite of this, an oppositional culture in the minority group can nevertheless be sustained in steady state if there is enough cultural segmentation in terms of role models, or if the size of the minority group is large enough, or if the degree of oppositional identity it implies is high enough. We also demonstrate that the higher the level of harassment and the number of racist individuals in the society, the more likely an oppositional minority culture will emerge. We finally show that ethnic identity and socialization effort can be more intense in mixed rather than segregated neighborhoods.

Introduction

In April 1992, when a mostly white jury acquitted four police officers accused in a videotaped of beating a black motorist, thousands of people in Los Angeles, mainly young black and Latino males, joined in what has often been characterized as a race riot. In the summer of 2001, ethnic riots occurred on the streets of towns and cities in the north of England (e.g. Oldham, Leeds, Burnley, Bradford), involving young British Asian men. More recently, in November 2005, riots emerged in Paris' suburbs, sparked by the accidental deaths of two Muslim teenagers, and then spread to 300 French towns and cities. Most of the rioters were the French-born children of immigrants from Arab and African countries.

These race and ethnic riots¹ have all recently placed the issue of racial and ethnic identity at the forefront of political debate in the United States and in Europe. Identity is the result of an individual's choice, often the choice not to conform to the accepted norms but rather to different norms that characterize a social, ethnic, or religious group.² Furthermore, ethnic identities can be “oppositional”, that is, they require the rejection of the accepted norms of the majority group (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998). This is the case, for instance, of the so-called “ghetto culture” in the United States (Wilson, 1987). Also, studies in the US have found that African American students in poor areas may be ambivalent about learning standard English and performing well at school because this may be regarded as “acting white” (Delpit, 1995, Fordham and Ogbu, 1986, Ogbu, 1997, Austen-Smith and Fryer, 2005, Selod and Zenou, 2006, Battu et al., 2007, Fryer and Torelli, 2010).³

Oppositional identities often produce significant economic and social conflicts, as in the case of the ethnic and race riots cited above. But how intense are oppositional identities? Which economic and sociological factors mostly contribute to their formation? In particular, does neighborhood segregation induce intense and oppositional identities? In this paper we attempt to provide some answers to these questions.

A large literature in economics, sociology and anthropology, documents how ethnic traits are transmitted from parents to children and how ethnic identity is adopted (see, in particular, Akerlof and Kranton, 2000, Alba, 1990, Bernal and Knight, 1993, Boyd and Richerson, 1985, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981, Phinney, 1990). In our reading of the evidence, parents directly make various socialization choices, e.g. the rules and beliefs the family conforms to and how much time they spend with their children. Parents also realize that socialization is partially the product of the social interaction their children engage into, which they affect by choosing which neighborhood to live in, the school children attend, their social circle of friends and acquaintances, the civic/social clubs and churches they belong to, etc. The role of parents in the socialization of their own children is nonetheless limited by the children's pro-active role in choosing who to imitate and learn from, thereby directly shaping their own cultural identity. An individual's general identity, in the words of Akerlof and Kranton (2000, p. 720), “is bound to social categories; and individuals identify with people in some categories and differentiate themselves from those in others.”

We model the formation of ethnic traits along these lines, that is, as a mechanism that interacts cultural transmission and socialization inside the family,⁴ peer effects and social interactions, and identity choice.

To be more precise, our model has three main components:

(i) Trait transmission from parent to child: In period t, the child adopts his parent's identity with some probability, which is a positive function of parental effort ${\tau }_i$. Parent also chooses the intensity of their own identity ${\alpha }_i$. The parent's choice of ${\tau }_i$ is determined altruistically, but with “imperfect empathy” in that the parent evaluates the child's future well-being as if the child has picked up the same trait (oppositional or mainstream) as the parent himself.

(ii) Trait transmission from role model to child: In the absence of successful parental transmission, the child can adopt the trait of a randomly picked role model in the society at large. In this perspective, d represents the “segmentation” of society, which captures the populations from which a minority role model is chosen from. When d=1, the role model is drawn from society at large. When d=0 the role model is drawn only from the minority population.

(iii) Child's determination of the intensity of his trait, or his own identity: Last, the intensity with which the child identifies himself with his trait is chosen by the child, along with a “good” or “bad” action. These two choices are referred to as an “identity choice.” Choosing an identity of any kind is costly (denoted by $C({\alpha }_i)$). But having a strong identity reduces psychological cost of interacting with others. The optimal choice of action is predetermined by assumption (mainstream individuals chooses the “good” action, oppositional ones chooses the “bad” action) but the optimal choice of intensity of identity will depend on Q_i, the probability of interacting with someone of a different type, and I_i, the psychological cost of this interaction. As a result, $Q_i\times I_i$ is the expected psychological cost of interacting with someone with a different value system.

We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional culture in the minority group (i.e. individuals who reject the mainstream values) can be sustained if and only if there is enough cultural segmentation in terms of role models, and/or the size of minority group is large enough, and/or the degree of oppositional identity it implies is high enough, and/or the socio-economic opportunity cost of the actions it prescribes is small enough. In this steady-state equilibrium, the socialization effort of oppositional parents is higher than that of the mainstream minority families. There is indeed an asymmetry between the two cultural traits, “mainstream” and “oppositional”. Since the majority group individuals are by definition mainstreams, there is an “imposed” process of exposition to role models from that group.⁵ This tends, quite naturally, to favor the diffusion of the mainstream values into the minority community. Given that, in order to have a long-run constant fraction of oppositional individuals, it has to be the case that their family socialization effort compensates for this asymmetric cultural bias. However, when the “imposed” socialization through the majority cultural model is strong enough, then there is no way for the oppositional culture to survive and there is, in that case, full assimilation of the minority group to the mainstream values.

We then show that it is possible (and we identify sufficient conditions on economic fundamentals) that ethnic identity and socialization efforts are more intense in mixed rather than in segregated neighborhoods. As a result, our analysis suggests that the effect of mixed neighborhood on identity formation and socialization might be quite complex and may generate in some cases perverse results. This is particularly so if mixed neighborhood are conducive of explicit acts of rejection on the part of the majority group.

The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we discuss the contribution of our paper with respect to the literature. In Section 3, we present the main model. Section 4 deals with the cultural equilibrium analysis and some comparative statics results. Section 5 is devoted to the justification of our assumptions and modeling choices. In Section 6, we introduce the possibility of harassment of the minority group. Section 7 considers the joint cultural evolution of both racist or intolerant majority preferences and oppositional minority culture. Finally, Section 8 concludes, provides some empirical evidence and discusses some policy issues.