Multiracial identities and resilience to racism: The role of families

Multiracial identities and resilience to racism: The role of families

Medical News Today
2021-09-14

Annabelle Atkin, Assistant Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana


What challenges do Multiracial people face, and how do these challenges affect their well-being? Dr. Annabelle Atkin explains in this feature. Liliya Rodnikova/Stocksy

In this opinion feature, Dr. Annabelle Atkin — an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN — explores the unique challenges that Multiracial people face in attaining and maintaining well-being and offers suggestions on how to mitigate those challenges.

“I thought you were full Asian,” a professor of color once told me. “I didn’t know you were Asian!” a native Korean friend had told me a couple of years before.

Being Multiracial is often complicated for people to understand. This is especially the case in the context of the United States, where the dominant White group has fought to establish and maintain a clear color line throughout history to justify the oppression of People of Color.

The racial groups we know today are not biological. They were created, or socially constructed. And they are always changing. Just take a look at how the U.S. Census categories have shifted across the decades.

To protect the racial power structure in the U.S., Multiracial people have been erased throughout its history. One of the most well-known examples of this is the one-drop rule, which was created to ensure that anyone with a single drop of “Black blood” be considered Black to justify enslavement and, later, Jim Crow segregation.

As a result, our Multiraciality is often overlooked, and many people still struggle with accepting and acknowledging Multiracial individuals because to do so challenges their Monoracial understanding of the world…

Read the entire article here.

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