The Meaning of Multiraciality: A Racially Queer Exploration of Multiracial College Students’ Identity Production

Posted in Books, Campus Life, Gay & Lesbian, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2022-06-19 22:33Z by Steven

The Meaning of Multiraciality: A Racially Queer Exploration of Multiracial College Students’ Identity Production

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
June 2022
168 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-1727-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-1728-6

Aurora Chang, Director of Faculty Development and Career Advancement
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

The Meaning of Multiraciality: A Racially Queer Exploration of Multiracial College Students’ Identity Production provides a comprehensive overview of Multiraciality as a term, experience, and identity using data from a study of Multiracial college students and well as the author’s own experiences as a Multiracial person. Utilizing a racially queer framework, they discuss what it means to be a Multiracial insider (being a Multiracial researcher studying Multiracial study participants), the counter-stories of Multiracial college students, the theorizing that has emerged as a result, and the educational consequences and impacts on Mulitracial students overall. The author explores the following questions: How do Multiracial students produce their identities? How do Multiracial students exercise their agency? How does the notion of Multiraciality perpetuate and disrupt notions of race? How can we expand theoretical understandings of race so that they take Multiracial people into account, specifically within educational settings? The author illustrates the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Their counter-narratives reveal an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Chapter One: Multiracial Me
  • Chapter Two: The History and Complexity of the Term, Multiracial
  • Chapter Three: Multiraciality and Critical Race Theory
  • Chapter Four: Multiracial College Students’ Counter-Narratives
  • Chapter Five: Multiracial Students and Educational Implications
  • Chapter Six: Racial Queerness
  • Epilogue
  • References
  • About the Author
Tags: , ,

The Privilege of Racial Identity

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2022-05-20 15:53Z by Steven

The Privilege of Racial Identity

The Spectator: The University of Wisconsin-Eau-Claire’s Student Newspaper Since 1923
2022-04-28

Kiara Jackson

I can’t, nor will I ever speak for all mixed-race people, because every story is different. Every story has its own challenges. But, I can try to speak for myself.

Mixed people do not owe anyone an explanation for their Blackness.

No one gets to decide their race. But most people get the privilege to say “I’m Black,” or “I’m Native Hawaiian.” They get the privilege of knowing exactly where they come from, exactly what to tell people when asked and exactly what bubble to fill in on standardized tests.

They get the privilege of racial identity.

Being mixed, you don’t get this same privilege. I can’t, nor will I ever speak for all mixed-race people, because every story is different. Every story has its own challenges. But, I can try to speak for myself…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,

Mana Tangatarua: Mixed heritages, ethnic identity and biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Oceania, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2022-05-13 17:17Z by Steven

Mana Tangatarua: Mixed heritages, ethnic identity and biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Routledge
2017-11-16
236 Pages
14 B/W Illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9781138233362
Paperback ISBN: 9780367885304
eBook ISBN: 9781315309811

Edited By:

Zarine L. Rocha, Affiliated Researcher
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Melinda Webber, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work
University of Auckland

This volume explores mixed race/mixed ethnic identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Mixed race and mixed ethnic identity are growing in popularity as research topics around the world. This edited collection looks at mixed race and mixed ethnic identity in New Zealand: a unique context, as multiple ethnic identities have been officially recognised for more than 30 years.

The book draws upon research across a range of disciplines, exploring the historical and contemporary ways in which official and social understandings of mixed race and ethnicity have changed. It focuses on the interactions between race, ethnicity, national identity, indigeneity and culture, especially in terms of visibility and self-defined identity in the New Zealand context.

Mana Tangatarua situates New Zealand in the existing international scholarship, positioning experiences from New Zealand within theoretical understandings of mixedness. The chapters develop wider theories of mixed race and mixed ethnic identity, at macro and micro levels, looking at the interconnections between the two. The volume as a whole reveals the diverse ways in which mixed race is experienced and understood, providing a key contribution to the theory and development of mixed race globally.

Table of Contents

  • Foreword Paul Spoonley
  • Introduction: Situating mixed race in New Zealand and the world. Zarine L. Rocha and Melinda Webber
  • Section one: Mixedness and classifications across generations
    • Chapter One: A history of mixed race in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Zarine L. Rocha and Angela Wanhalla
    • Chapter Two: Reflections of identity: ethnicity, ethnic recording and ethnic mobility. Robert Didham
    • Chapter Three: Is ethnicity all in the family? How parents in Aotearoa New Zealand identify their children. Polly Atatoa Carr, Tahu Kukutai, Dinusha Bandara and Patrick Broman
    • Chapter Four: Lives at the intersections: multiple ethnicities and child protection. Emily Keddell
  • Section two: Mixed identifications, indigeneity and biculturalism
    • Chapter Five: Raranga Wha: Mana whenua, mana moana and mixedness in one Māori/Fijian/Samoan/Pākehā whānau. Rae Si‘ilata
    • Chapter Six: Beyond Appearances: Mixed ethnic and cultural identities among biliterate Japanese-European New Zealander young adults. Kaya Oriyama
    • Chapter Seven: Love and Politics: Rethinking Biculturalism and Multiculturalism in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Lincoln I. Dam
    • Chapter Eight: Māori and Pākehā encounters of difference – the realisation that we’re not the same. Karyn Paringatai
  • Section three: Mixing the majority/Pākehā identity
    • Chapter Nine: Multidimensional intersections: the merging and emerging of complex European settler identities. Robert Didham, Paul Callister and Geoff Chambers
    • Chapter Ten: Hauntology and Pākehā: disrupting the notion of homogeneity. Esther Fitzpatrick
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A mixed-race son choosing his identity is a lesson for us all

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2022-05-06 02:09Z by Steven

A mixed-race son choosing his identity is a lesson for us all

The San Francisco Chronicle
2022-05-03

Kevin Fisher-Paulson

This week, Aidan decided he is Black.

He announced this at the family dinner table, as we served mashed potatoes, green beans and meat loaf. Aidan used to like my meat loaf, but everything changes.

Aidan’s Black now. Partly because he feels more comfortable in his skin at Compass High, whereas I think he felt that he needed to be White while he was at Riordan. Partly because of teenage rebellion. If my husband Brian and I were Black, I’m pretty sure he’d say he was white.

When he was little, he used to insist on his whiteness. One afternoon, after kindergarten, he got into the front seat of the Griffin (our old family car) and announced, “Zane’s the only one who has to sit in the back of the car.” Aidan had missed the nuances in his teacher’s lesson about Rosa Parks. It is one of the few times I’ve ever seen Zane cry.

Aidan’s Black now. Partly, I hope, because he knows that although he and Zane have challenges, underneath it all, they are brothers.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , ,

Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, Second Edition: Busting Myths about Human Nature

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs on 2022-05-05 01:35Z by Steven

Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, Second Edition: Busting Myths about Human Nature

University of California Press
May 2022
352 pages
Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9780520379602
eBook ISBN: 9780520976818

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

A compelling takedown of prevailing myths about human behavior, updated and expanded to meet the current moment.

There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; and men and women are wholly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Agustín Fuentes tackles misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, and incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution that requires us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.”

Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender. This revised and expanded edition provides up-to-date references, data, and analyses, and addresses new topics, including the popularity of home DNA testing kits and the rise of ‘”incel” culture; the resurgence of racist, nativist thinking and the internet’s influence in promoting bad science; and a broader understanding of the diversity of sex and gender.

Tags: ,

Researchers Should Understand and Adapt Race and Ethnicity Data That Change Over Time

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Work, United States on 2022-04-22 02:45Z by Steven

Researchers Should Understand and Adapt Race and Ethnicity Data That Change Over Time

Child Trends
2022-03-31

Alaina Flannigan, Research Scientist II
Bethesda, Maryland

Rachel Rosenberg, Research Scientist II
Bethesda, Maryland

Alyssa Liehr, Research Scientist
Bethesda, Maryland

Reva Dalela, Research Assistant
Bethesda, Maryland

Mya’ Sanders, Senior Research Assistant
Bethesda, Maryland

Embedding race equity principles into supports provided for young people who age out of foster care can better prepare them for a successful transition into adulthood. Child welfare practitioners and policymakers must consider how race and racism affect a young person’s child welfare experience and the services and supports they receive. For example, practitioners and policymakers should understand how employment program outcomes vary by race/ethnicity, or the ways in which access to culturally competent sexual and reproductive health care varies by race/ethnicity. This focus on race equity principles ensures that all young people have access to services tailored to their needs.

For practitioners and policymakers to accurately interpret data and make decisions about programming for all racial and ethnic groups, researchers must be able to capture someone’s racial and ethnic identity alongside their outcomes. One common resource available to researchers who want to examine outcomes over time is panel, or longitudinal, data, for which the same people are repeatedly and regularly surveyed over an extended period of time. However, researchers should carefully consider how they use these data in analysis because individuals’ responses to race/ethnicity and other demographic variables may change over time. When researchers treat race/ethnicity as an unchanging variable they potentially miss important equity considerations.

Reviews of panel data show that responses to questions on racial and ethnic identity can and do change over time. While this is a fairly common occurrence in longitudinal data for respondents of all ages (adolescence through adulthood), such changes may be particularly meaningful for young people aging out of foster care. These young people’s child welfare experiences (e.g., frequent moves, lack of information about family history, placement in foster homes with parents of a different racial and ethnic identity) may leave them without the information needed to form a healthy racial and ethnic identity. During the transition to adulthood, implicit and explicit biases around racial and ethnic identity from both individuals and systems can create opportunities and barriers at key moments in life, such as pursing postsecondary education or attaining first jobs. Despite the potential fluidity of racial and ethnic identity, however, this variable is commonly treated as static and unchanging in analysis. To date, there are few resources to guide researchers in designing and conducting analyses that both honor the racial and ethnic identities of young people and maximize the reliability of the data…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Changing from Visibility to Invisibility—An Intersectional Perspective on Mixedness in Switzerland and Morocco

Posted in Africa, Articles, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Religion, Social Science on 2022-04-20 20:37Z by Steven

Changing from Visibility to Invisibility—An Intersectional Perspective on Mixedness in Switzerland and Morocco

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020030
17 pages

Gwendolyn Gilliéron, Associate Research Fellow
University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Grand Est, France

In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or race in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzing the interrelation of these factors. The article discusses how and under which circumstances mixed children become visible in Switzerland and Morocco using a comparative and intersectional approach to mixedness. Based on 23 biographical narrative interviews, I analyze three situations of stigmatization: racialization, language practices and othering due to religious affiliation. Stigmatization processes due to mixedness, it is argued, are a relational phenomenon depending not only on markers such as ‘race’, ethnicity and religion but also on their interplay with gender, class, language and biographical experiences. The results suggest that mixed individuals have found creative ways to navigate their visibility: they normalize their binational origin, look for alternative spaces of belonging, emphasize their ‘Swiss-ness’ or ‘Moroccan-ness’, use languages to influence their social positioning or acquire knowledge about their binational origin in order to confront stigmatizations. The study reveals further that processes of othering due to mixedness are not only an issue in ‘Western’ societies that look back on a long history of immigration and have pronounced migration discourses. Even in Morocco, a country where immigration has so far been a marginal phenomenon, the importance of social hierarchies for the positioning of people of binational origin is evident.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Tags: , , , ,

Episode 205: Understanding our Multiple Identities

Posted in Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2022-04-15 00:43Z by Steven

Episode 205: Understanding our Multiple Identities

Shifting Our Schools
2022-04-11

Jeff Utecht, Host

Sarah Gaither, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Dr. Gaither is a social & developmental psychologist studying social identities. She runs the Duke University Identity and Diversity Lab.

Listen to the episode (00:18:53) here.

Tags: , , , ,

I Color Myself Different

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2022-04-05 02:44Z by Steven

I Color Myself Different

Scholastic
2022-04-05
40 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1338789621

Colin Kaepernick, Eric Wilkerson (Illustrator)

An inspiring story of identity and self-esteem from celebrated athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick.

When Colin Kaepernick was five years old, he was given a simple school assignment: draw a picture of yourself and your family. What young Colin does next with his brown crayon changes his whole world and worldview, providing a valuable lesson on embracing and celebrating his Black identity through the power of radical self-love and knowing your inherent worth.

I Color Myself Different is a joyful ode to Black and Brown lives based on real events in young Colin’s life that is perfect for every reader’s bookshelf. It’s a story of self-discovery, staying true to one’s self, and advocating for change… even when you’re very little!

Tags: , , , ,

Socioemotional wellbeing of mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and mechanisms

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Social Science, United Kingdom, United States on 2022-03-15 21:30Z by Steven

Socioemotional wellbeing of mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and mechanisms

SSM – Population Health
Volume 5, August 2018
pages 147-159
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2018.06.010

James Nazroo
Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Afshin Zilanawala
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Meichu Chen
University of Michigan

Laia Bécares
Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Pamela Davis-Kean
University of Michigan

James S. Jackson
University of Michigan

Yvonne Kelly
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Lidia Panico
Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques, Paris, France

Amanda Sacker
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Highlights

  • Mixed race/ethnicity children are thought to have poorer socioemotional wellbeing
  • We find no evidence that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing in a study covering children aged 5/6 in the US and UK
  • We find that mixed race/ethnicity children do have socio-economic advantage
  • This socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing

Existing literature suggests that mixed race/ethnicity children are more likely to experience poor socioemotional wellbeing in both the US and the UK, although the evidence is stronger in the US. It is suggested that this inequality may be a consequence of struggles with identity formation, more limited connections with racial/ethnic/cultural heritage, and increased risk of exposure to racism.

Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (n = 13,734) and the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n ~ 6250), we examine differences in the socioemotional wellbeing of mixed and non-mixed 5/6 year old children in the UK and US and explore heterogeneity in outcomes across different mixed groups in both locations. We estimate a series of linear regressions to examine the contribution of factors that may explain any observed differences, including socio-economic and cultural factors, and examine the extent to which these processes vary across the two nations.

We find no evidence of greater risk for poor socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in both national contexts. We find that mixed race/ethnicity children experience socio-economic advantage compared to their non-mixed minority counterparts and that socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing. Cultural factors do not contribute to differences in socioemotional wellbeing across mixed and non-mixed groups.

Our evidence suggests then that at age 5/6 there is no evidence of poorer socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in either the UK or the US. The contrast between our findings and some previous literature, which reports that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing, may reflect changes in the meaning of mixed identities across periods and/or the developmental stage of the children we studied.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,