UC Irvine

Racial disparities in the United States are well-documented, but social scientists know little about how other aspects of race, like skin color, affect people's experiences within different institutions. A growing body of research demonstrates that racial minorities with darker skin have worse socioeconomic outcomes than their lighter-skinned counterparts. However, because this work commonly analyzes individuals from different families, scholars have difficulty extricating whether variations in the outcome of interest are due to skin color bias or to differences in unobserved family characteristics. I improve upon prior studies by using an innovative within-family approach with sibling data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which I argue provides analytical leverage. I first examine the relationship between skin color and different outcomes among a nationally-representative sample. Then, to account for mutual unobserved and observed family characteristics, I use sibling fixed-effects models to consider whether outcomes vary by skin color among members of the same family. I find that skin color is a significant predictor of the life chances of siblings in arrest outcomes, educational attainment, and income. This dissertation contributes to the existing literature by providing a first step towards understanding the implications of skin color for enduring racial inequality. I improve upon existing studies of colorism by analyzing siblings who have a shared family background. In doing so, my study begins to illuminate how skin color continues to be a source of stratification in the United States both across and within families for racial and ethnic minorities.