“People love playing the ‘what are you?’ game with me”: Street Racialization of American Indian and Alaska Native individuals

Abstract American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people are often excluded from the sociology of race within the United States. To expand research on racialization, this article examines how AIAN individuals experience and navigate racialization through the concept of “street race.” Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of 47 AIAN individuals living in urban settings nationally, I find that respondents’ experience an erasure of their Indigenous identity and their assumed street race to be “Asian,” “Middle Eastern,” “Black,” “Latinx/Spanish-speaking,” and “White.” These results varied by geography across the United States and demonstrate that a legal AIAN identity does not always match with the day-to-day encounters of street race.