How Ethnoracial Groups Spend Their Time

We know strikingly little about how time use varies across ethnoracial groups in the United States. We describe the daily lives of 210,586 White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people in the nationally representative American Time Use Survey (2003–2019). Activities are similarly unpleasant for all groups, but White people spend the most time on highly pleasant leisure activities, Asian people spend the most time in unpleasant ways, and Black people spend the most time doing affectively neutral activities, such as watching television. These patterns show continuity in across recent decades and in harmonized historic data. Black people spend the most and Hispanic people the least time alone. We conclude that time diaries are a promising resource for exploring nuances in the texture of ethnoracial groups’ daily experiences.