Multiracial Identity

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

What has been referred to as the 'multiracial millennium' signifies the hype around multiraciality. Since the 1990s the United States has seen an increasing public interest with the multiracial experience and in the multiracial body. This fascination in individuals with ambiguous and non-identifiable appearances created a curiosity that became visible in various cultural, political, and social realms. Magazines published special issues on multiraciality, such as Times' "The New Face of America," and brands, such as United Colors of Benetton, started marketing multiculturalism and increasingly displaying models with a non-white appearance. These discourses on multiraciality, depicting multiracial individuals as future oriented, successful, fashionable, and attractive, contributed strongly to impact the public perception of multiracial individuals. In order to get an insight into how this popular discourse is tackled by contemporary US American fiction, this thesis engages in a reading of Senna's short story collection You Are Free and Teju Cole's novel Open City. Both texts comment on multiraciality, and by unraveling aspects and issues related to the experiences of multiracial individuals they contribute to a critical assessment of racialized discourses. By questioning and challenging ideas connected to the concept of a multiracial subject, both texts raise a critical voice against euphemizing the concept of multiracial subjects and its multidimensional racialized implications for the individual.

This chapter presents preliminary findings from a study of the experiences and self-labeling of ten individuals who are biracial and whose parents identify themselves as monoracial members of minority groups. Implications for student affairs educators are shared.

This chapter reviews and critiques stage models of Black, White, and Multiracial identity development. It then presents the author's original Factor Model of Multiracial Identity (2001) and explores the impact of eight factors on the choice of racial identity of Multiracial people. The FMMI was one of the earliest ecological models of Multiracial identity, and formed the basis of Wijeyesinghe's subsequent work.

Mixed-race students have often been overlooked in research regarding racial identity development. Current research tends to focus on models of multiracial identity development and its implications for college instructors and support personnel, but very little research exists to identify the needs of multiracial students while they are in primary and secondary schools. For this reason, the literature review seeks to ask and possibly answer questions related to multiracial identity development and K-12 schooling.

The literature review provided evidence to suggest mixed-race individuals experience monoracism and microaggressions towards their multiracial heritage both systemically and directly at school, in their communities, and within their families. There is a need for more direct support at school for healthy multiracial identity development among students; however, most school staff are ill-equipped to do this. Lastly, there needs to be more research conducted to determine the best practices for school staff to use to support healthy multiracial identity development.

As Multiple Voices' new editorial team, we are committed to producing a journal that counters and provides promising alternatives to troubling legacies in the education of students with disabilities: especially students of Color, im/migrant students, and those who are emergent English learners. In doing so, we will continue the work of past editors to position Multiple Voices as the leading scholarly journal in our field.

When studying matters of race and education, there seems to be an assumption that the inclusion of all monoracial populations equates to a comprehensive look at all students, particularly students of color. But what about students who identify with more than one race? How do Multiracial students identify and how are they included/excluded with respect to educational curricula, policies and climates? This growing group presents an immediate opportunity and challenge to the educational community, because while educational researchers appropriately and vigorously pay attention to matters of traditionally under-represented monoracial groups of color, it has yet to be seen where Multiracial students fall into this discourse. Based on a qualitative study of 25 Multiracially identified college students, I explore the ways in which the notion of Multiraciality muddies traditional conversations about race and education in an effort to better understand the potential impact of this 'new' demographic within an educational context.

Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their
Life Stories presents multiracial student essays
focusing on growing up and living as a
mixed-race individual in a society founded
on monoracial understandings of race. The
purpose of the book is “to capture the phenomenology
of being mixed-race in a compelling
way, and in so doing to inspire, engage, and
move our readers” (p. xi). The edited book
contains 12 narratives written by self-identified
multiracial students: six men and six women,
either current students or recent graduates of
Dartmouth College.

Multiracial individuals report the social pressure of having to “choose” one of their racial groups is one primary source of psychological conflict. Yet because of their ability to maneuver among their multiple identities, multiracials also adopt flexible cognitive strategies in dealing with their social environments—demonstrating a benefit to having multiple racial identities. The current paper reviews recent research including multiracial participants to examine the behavioral and cognitive outcomes linked to being multiracial and pinpoints possible moderators that may affect these outcomes for future research. Limitations in applying monoracial identity frameworks to multiracial populations are also discussed.

Objective: This article analyzes how some multiracial people-the "products" of interracial relationships-conceptualize what counts as an interracial relationship and how they discuss the circumstances that influence these definitions. Background: Scholars have argued that the added complexity expanding multiracial populations contribute to dating and marriage market conditions requires additional study; this paper expands on limited research regarding how multiracial people perceive interraciality. Method: The paper utilizes in-depth interviews with self-identified multiracial women (N = 30) who used online dating platforms to facilitate their dating lives in three cities in Texas: Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Results: In framing their relationships through lenses centered around skin color, cultural difference, and "familiarity" in terms of seeing potential partners as similar to non-white male family members, multiracial women illustrate varied and overlapping means of describing their intimate relationships, providing additional nuance to sociological understandings of shifts in preferences and norms around partner choice across racial/ethnic lines and opening up opportunities to continue exploration of the impact of racial inequality on partner choice. Conclusion: Multiracial people internalize racial, gendered, and fetishistic framings about potential partners similarly to 2 monoracial people, demonstrating how racial boundaries and degrees of intimacy are (re)constructed for this growing demographic in the United States.

Identity is a fickle concept. When we talk about “ethnicity” and its ties to identity, we are engaged in a delicate balancing act, making meaning out of how we feel about ourselves and how others view us. Multiethnicity provides a compelling model of this negotiation; “authenticity” fundamentally boils down to an argument over “blood” and “culture,” between what others see and what’s in our hearts.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Lesson Plan for Teaching Four Stories Featuring Multi/Mixed Identities:
• Charles Yu’s “Third Class Superhero”
• Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”
• Viet Nguyen's “The Americans”
• and Gish Jen's “Who’s Irish?”

Fiction as a genre is well known for its ability to discuss a wide range of topics in a way that is both entertaining and empathetic. But while fictional pieces, especially the short story, are famous for creating narratives that help readers understand experiences unlike their own and characters unlike themselves, I would argue that fiction can also serve as a medium of self-reflection. As someone who identifies as multi-ethnic and multi-racial, understanding my identity through literature has been both eye-opening and difficult. Multi authors and works of fiction do exist. But they are rarely discussed as widely or taught in a way that focuses purely on their multi and mixed themes. This lesson plan exists to suggest strategies that teachers and professors may use to help comprehensively teach multi and non-multi students about the complexities and tensions surrounding mixed identities.  Target audience:  high school and college/university teachers and their students.  —Lesson plan created by Sierra Sweeney '20 as part of a class assignment at Swarthmore College, 2018..

Given the very large proportion of Hawaiians who are multiracial, our research examines Native Hawaiian identification in mixed-race Hawaiian families. We use the 1990 US Census, which affords a unique look at racial identification because multiracial people were required to choose one race over another. The results show support for our argument that place plays a central role in Pacific identity processes, illustrated in this case among Hawaiians. We find that strong ties to Hawai'i Á/ the spiritual and geographic home of the Hawaiian population Á/ are vital to the intergenerational transmission of Hawaiian identification in both continental and island multiracial families. We compare our results for multiracial Native Hawaiians to prior studies of American Indians and Asian Americans to identify any general patterns in correlates of racial identification choices. In each group, we find that familial and geographic relationships to the cultural and ancestral lands are strongly linked to racial identification.

This paper explores the following questions: a) What does it mean to self-identify as a biracial Mexicana? How does this self-identity impact me and others as an educator and leader in higher education? b) How are pain and privilege embodied and enacted in the choices I have made or circumstances I have confronted in higher educational settings? In what ways is whiteness ‘unbearable’? c) How, as teacher educators, can we integrate multiraciality into our pedagogy to prepare future teachers to work with minoritized monoracial and multiracial students?

“Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology,” in The Anthem Companion to Robert Park, ed. Peter Kivisto (New York: Anthem Press, 2017), 159–180.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Laboratorium, 2012, vol. 4, no. 2: 199– 217.

Research shows that multiracial individuals’ racial identities are often questioned because their appearances are not prototypical of their racial groups. We examined whether social activism performed by a multiracial person may bolster perceptions of that person as a legit- imate representative of the racial minority group. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in a voting paradigm voted for a multiracial over a monoracial candidate if the candidate displayed social activism. In addition, Study 3 found that candidates who displayed social acti- vism, rather than a generic racially prototypical behavior, were seen as more electable and representative of the association. Overall, our findings illuminate the power of social activism to alter perceptions of how representative multiracial individuals are of their racial min- ority groups.

From ancient times migrants to Japan have mixed with the local inhabitants and produced offspring. While much ethnic mixing has occurred in the distant past, many contemporary persons trace their immediate ancestry to more than one ethnic source.  I have been studying multiethnic individuals in Japan through interviews, psychological counseling, and ethnographic field work in Okinawa and Tokyo. In this paper I give five examples of these lives and explain how their identities are influenced by a wide range of political, legal, ideological social and psychological forces and constraints. Although some of the conditions are favorable, I will focus on problems that have become evident in my study.

Abstract: Through ethnography, I examine how hip-hop's expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically prolific, politically charged, and racially ...

The philosophical novel Zuid-Zuid-West (South-Southwest, 1926) by the Dutch-Surinamese author Albert Helman (1903-1996) is famous for the sharp critique of Dutch colonial policy in its epilogue. The remaining part of this novel has traditionally received little attention. This is all the more surprising since Zuid-Zuid-West represents one of the first examples of the turn toward ‘mestizaje’ in Latin American literature. By comparing Helman’s Zuid-Zuid-West (1926) with José Vasconcelos’ prophecy of the ‘new man’ in La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925), this article intends to highlight how these Latin American intellectuals attempted to concretize Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophecy of the ‘new man’ in the shape of the multiracial ‘mestizo’.

This paper reflects on ways in which intergenerational familial experience of the Japanese American World War II mass incarceration may have differentially affected the ethnic and racial identity development of multiracial Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans). I begin with a brief review of the literature related to the effects of the camps on Nisei, integrating psychological understandings of racial and ethnic identity development, contextual history, and research on the psychological effects; I focus here on effects for Nisei that have been connected to their intergenerational interactions: distancing from Japanese American heritage and identity, silence about the camp experience, and the negotiation of racism and discrimination. I turn then to the primary focus of the paper: Using a combination of autoethnographical reflection, examples from qualitative interviews, and literature review, I engage in reflective exploration of two ways in which intergenerational effects of the camp experience influenced Sansei racial and ethnic identities that vary among monoracial and multiracial Sansei: familial transmission of Japanese American culture by Nisei to Sansei, and the intergenerational effects and transmission of racial discrimination and racial acceptance. I conclude with reflections on intergenerational healing within Japanese American families and communities, and reflections on the relation of these dynamics to current issues of racial justice more generally.

Research on racial fluidity has become increasingly common as researchers seek to understand the ways and reasons people change their racial identifications and/or are perceived differently over time and across contexts. Concurrently, researchers have deepened their investigations of the attitudinal and identity aspects of "color," that is the ways that people's racial and political attitudes vary based on skin tone among members of the same racial group, particularly black Americans. This paper attempts to blend research on racial fluidity and color into an exploration of adolescent racial identity formation. I examine the effect skin tone on the likelihood and type of racial identity change among multiracial black adolescents as they transition into adulthood. My results reveal that lighter skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to a non-black single race, while darker skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to black only.

Larry: A guy at work told me “Mixed marriage offends me, it just offends me.” And I can accept that, it's not for everybody.  But it's his heart that's hurting, not mine.  Not everyone can do this.  Not everyone is that strong.
Debra:  Yes, everybody has to decide what they can live with and can't live with.
(From an interview with a black male-white female couple)

Robert: We’re just like any other couple….perfectly normal.
Linda: As far as things happening to us, we’re real boring.
(A black male spouse and a white female spouse in separate interviews)

As persons in intimate relationships can quickly confirm, individuals looking at the same picture, or living through the same event, often report completely different experiences. Attending to different aspects of situations, we tend to make sense of what we are sensing, feeling, and thinking in different ways.  The two couples quoted above report very different experiences, just as individual partners in interracial relationships may have differing takes or constructions of what is “real” or “true” for them.  While this can be a source of confusion or frustration, it is also a phenomenon that all couples must learn to effectively handle if their relationship is to be successful.  As partners in interracial relationships diverge from one another on multiple axes of power, such as gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, and social class, their basic beliefs and assumptions often differ markedly, and such differences shape the lenses through which they view their interpersonal worlds. Therefore, partners in interracial relationships, coming from different social locations, may exhibit very different understandings of everyday situations that they encounter.

A substantial literature has examined the nature of social categorization, a fundamental process having important implications for a wide variety of social phenomena. The great majority of this research has focused on the role of particular, clearly identified social categories (e.g. race, nationality, etc.) while ignoring or holding constant other identity dimensions. This approach has afforded considerable leverage for understanding how salient social identities influence perception, judgment, and behavior. However, it leaves unaddressed many questions about how particular social identities become salient and how (and whether) identities might be inferred when category membership is ambiguous or unknown. Everyday social perception often occurs under conditions of volatility (dynamic contexts), uncertainty (missing information), complexity (multiple bases for categorization), and ambiguity (unclear meaning of available cues). As a consequence, research must address how these factors might qualify basic processes of social categorization. Available evidence is reviewed, and directions for future research are discussed.

Using Holland et al.'s (Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity and their concept of figured worlds, this article provides an overview of how twenty-five undergraduates of color came to produce a Multiracial identity. Using Critical Race Theory methodology with ethnographic interviewing as the primary method, I specifically focus on the ways in which Multiracial figured worlds operate within a racial borderland (Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera-The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987), an alternate, marginal world where improvisational play (Holland et al. in Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) and facultad became critical elements of survival. Participants exercised their agency by perforating monoracial storylines and developed a complex process of identity production that informed their behaviors by a multifaceted negotiation of positionalities. I end by focusing on implications for urban education that can be drawn from this study.

The term multiracial is complex. Recent research has adopted a multidimensional view initially proposed by Rockquemore and colleagues (2002, 2009) for examining racial identity among Black/White biracials. This approach has acknowledged the social construction of race and broadened the range of racial identity options beyond the two “traditional” options of being “Black” or “biracial.” This study was designed to further assess this framework by examining a more diverse multiracial sample from Canada and the U.S. (N = 122). Both the Black/White biracials (n = 38) and Asian/White biracials (n = 40) showed great variability in their selection of Rockquemore’s multiracial identity categories, but the pattern of responses differed across the two groups. In addition to revealing different patterns of identity selection between Asian/White and Black/White biracials, findings demonstrated the importance of identity validation by others and its relation to conceptions of the self. Having a multiracial identity that is validated by others (as opposed to invalidated or contextually-dependent identities) was associated with higher levels of identity integration and self-concept clarity. Theoretical implications for extending a multidimensional model to other biracial groups are discussed.

This thesis examines print media news stories about Black/White interracial families from 1990-2003. Using the concept of dialogism, I conduct a textual analysis of selected newspaper and news magazine stories to examine the dialogic interaction between dominant and resistant discourses of racial identity. My findings suggest that a multiracial identity project can be seen emerging in print media stories about interracial families, but the degree to which this project is visible depends on each journalist's placement of individual voices and discourses within the narrative of each story. I find some evidence of a move from placing interracial families within narratives of conflict toward a more optimistic view of such families' position in society.

Historically, the principle of hypodescent specified that individuals with one Black and one White parent should be considered Black. Two experiments examined whether categorizations of racially ambiguous targets reflect this principle. Participants studied ambiguous target faces accompanied by profiles that either did or did not identify the targets as having multiracial backgrounds (biological, cultural, or both biological and cultural). Participants then completed a speeded dualcategorization task requiring Black/not Black and White/not White judgments (Experiments 1 and 2) and deliberate categorization tasks requiring participants to describe the races (Experiment 2) of target faces. When a target was known to have mixed-race ancestry, participants were more likely to rapidly categorize the target as Black (and not White); however, the same cues also increased deliberate categorizations of the targets as “multiracial.” These findings suggest that hypodescent still characterizes the automatic racial categorizations of many perceivers, although more complex racial identities may be acknowledged upon more thoughtful reflection.