Race, Gender, and Linked Fate

For African Americans, linked fate is the recognition that individual life chances are inextricably tied to the race as a whole. Using data from the 1996 National Black Election Study, the author empirically tested two competing hypotheses about the effect of gender identification on race identification as measured by linked fate. One hypothesis suggests that Black women who identify strongly with their gender will report a lower sense of race identification. The other suggests that Black women who identify strongly with their gender will report a higher sense of race identification. This research is important because it is the first to extend the application of the linked fate model used to measure race identification to the case in which gender matters. By so doing, this study demonstrates the importance of theorizing gender as opposed to simply adding the variable (gender) to a regression model and controlling for its effects statistically.