Surfacing Racial Stereotypes through Identity Portrayal

Ian Stewart, Gauri Kambhatla, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract: People express racial stereotypes through conversations with others, increasingly in a digital format; as a result, the ability to computationally identify racial stereotypes could be beneficial to help mitigate some of the harmful effects of stereotyping. In this work, we seek to better understand how we can computationally surface racial stereotypes in text by identifying linguistic features associated with differences in racial identity portrayal, focused on two races (Black and White). We collect novel data of individuals’ self-presentation via crowdsourcing, where each crowdworker answers a set of prompts from their own perspective (real identity), and from the perspective of another racial identity (portrayed identity), keeping the gender constant. We use these responses as a dataset to identify stereotypes. Through a series of experiments based on classifications between real and portrayed identities, we show that generalizations and stereotypes appear to be more prevalent amongst white participants than black participants. Through analyses of predictive words and word usage patterns, we find that some of the most predictive features of an author portraying a different racial identity are known stereotypes, and reveal how people of different identities see themselves and others.