Goldsmith, Arthur H., Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity, Jr. 2007. “From Dark to Light: Skin Color and Wages among African-Americans.” Journal of Human Resources 42(4): 701–738.
This paper develops and tests a theory, referred to as “preference for whiteness,” which predicts that the interracial (white-black) and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens. Using data drawn from the Multi City Study of Urban Inequality and the National Survey of Black Americans, we report evidence largely consistent with the theory. Moreover, we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps, and find that favorable treatment of lighter-skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory.
Arthur H. Goldsmith is a professor of economics at Washington and Lee University. Darrick Hamilton is an assistant professor at Milano—the New School for Management and Urban Policy. William Darity, Jr. is a professor of arts and science at Duke University. This work is supported by grant # 0213838 from the National Science Foundation. The authors would like to thank Rebecca Blank, Erica Field, Patrick Mason, Jon Veum, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach for extensive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. They are also grateful to Catherine Eckel, Noel Gaston, James Jackson, and seminar participants at Virginia Tech University, Bond University—Gold Coast Australia, the Program for Research on Black Americans at the University of Michigan, the University of Queensland, and Davidson College for helpful comments during the formative stages of this work. The authors also acknowledge helpful comments by two JHR referees. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning May 2008 through April 2011 from Darrick Hamilton at hamiltod@newschool.edu