Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale for Asian Americans: Testing the Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance Across Generational Status

Color-blind racial ideology, the belief that race does not matter and racism does not exist, is a modern expression of racism, as it denies the reality of racial issues that people of color experience (Neville, Lilly, Duran, Lee, & Browne, 2000). We tested Neville et al.'s (2000) Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS), the most widely used measure of color-blind racial ideology, in a sample of 344 Asian American adults. Given the lack of psychometric evidence and that Asian Americans have a unique sociopolitical history in the United States associated with distinct forms of racism (e.g., perpetual foreigner stereotypes and the model minority myth), we tested previously established measurement models of the CoBRAS for this population. We also conducted measurement invariance of the CoBRAS across generational status, given the discrepancy in awareness of racial issues depending on indicators of acculturation. Results suggest that the original oblique three-factor model had a poor fit to the data. Alternatively, we found that a bifactor model, with one general factor and three group factors (Unawareness of Blatant Racial Issues, Institutional Discrimination, and Racial Privilege), was the best-fitting model. Examination of model-based internal consistency estimates of the bifactor model suggests that unidimensional representation (total scale score) is possible. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis found evidence of configural, metric, and scalar invariance across two generational groups (first and 1.5 group and second and beyond group), suggesting that they interpreted CoBRAS items in a similar fashion. Implications for CoBRAS utility with Asian Americans and future research directions are discussed. What is the public significance of this article? The current study validated the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) with Asian Americans and also found that the CoBRAS operated equivalently across generational status. Results advance the utility of the CoBRAS to study the role of color-blind racial ideology among Asian Americans regarding race-related attitudes and racism.