Identity Salience Theory

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Identity Salience Hierarchy of Black LGBT Individuals
The dominant theoretical paradigm for explaining identity salience assumes that identities exist in structured social relationships and identity invocation is situational (Stryker 1968). Furthermore, identity theory argues that multiple identities could co-exist in a “salience hierarchy” according to their relative salience. In an organizational context, individuals consider their identities’ subjective importance and situational relevance in determining their salience hierarchy (Ashforth and Johnson 2001). Similarly, I argue that black LGBTs would consider the subjective importance and situational relevance of their racial and sexual identities in the context of same-sex marriage to make
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The mainstream LGBT community has devoted their sociopolitical, legal, and academic resources into the legalization of same-sex marriage for over a decade. The actual political momentum for same-sex marriage started in 2004, when Massachusetts became the first in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage. The academic inquiry and debate regarding same-sex marriage had begun a decade before any legal actions took place in the 1990s. The 2013 Pew Report on LGBT Americans shows that 58% of LGBT Americans consider marriage equality to be the “top priority” concern for them and 52% stated that they would like to get (legally) married one day. While these results show that even within the general American LGBT population, the attitudes toward and perception of the significance of same-sex marriage are heterogeneous, the majority opinion regarding same-sex marriage among LGBT Americans is …show more content…
3b: Higher levels of self-reported experiences of discrimination by LGBT identity and status in the racial community will positively affect black LGBT respondents’ attitude about same-sex marriage.
Relative Discrimination Hypothesis
H4: Black LGBT respondents who report higher levels of self-reported experiences of racial discrimination than discrimination based on LGBT identity and status will perceive same-sex marriage as having a lower impact on their lives than those who report higher levels of LGBT identity and status-based discrimination than racial