“There Are Stereotypes for Everything”: Multiracial Adolescents Navigating Racial Identity under White Supremacy

Despite the enduring popular view that the rise in the multiracial population heralds our nation’s transformation into a post-racial society, Critical Multiracial Theory (MultiCrit) asserts that how multiracial identity status is constructed is inextricably tied to systems and ideologies that maintain the white supremacist status quo in the United States. MultiCrit, like much of the multiracial identity literature, focuses predominantly on the experiences of emerging adults; this means we know little about the experiences of multiracial adolescents, a peak period for identity development. The current paper uses MultiCrit to examine how a diverse sample of multiracial youth (n = 49; Mage = 15.5 years) negotiate racial identity development under white supremacy. Our qualitative interview analysis reveals: (a) the salience of socializing messages from others, (b) that such messages reinforce a (mono)racist societal structure via discrimination, stereotyping, and invalidation, and (c) that multiracial youth frequently resist (mono)racist assertions as they make sense of their own identities. Our results suggest that multiracial youth are attentive to the myriad ways that white supremacy constructs and constrains their identities, and thus underscores the need to bring a critical lens to the study of multiracial identity development.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Biracial/Multiracial/Multiethnic Status: Friendship Homophily in Early Adolescence

This special issue highlights biracial/multiracial/multiethnic early adolescents as a fast-growing demographic warranting greater inclusion in developmental research. We address several likely barriers to inclusion related to the conceptualization and measurement of biracial/multiracial/multiethnic status and offer recommendations for including Multiracial youth that are informed by the research questions of interest. With a diverse sample of 610 early adolescents (11% Multiracial), we explore Multiracial youths’ racial/ethnic homophily in their best friendship. Multiracial youth were less likely to perceive a racial/ethnic match and less likely to objectively match (i.e., their best friend also self-reported being multiracial) compared to their monoracial counterparts. Multiracial youth perceived a racial/ethnic match with their best friend when they and their best friend both reported the exact same monoracial backgrounds. They were less likely to perceive a match when there was only a partial (i.e., one background overlapped) or no objective match. Practical recommendations are provided for future research.

Multiracial Youth Identity Meta-Ethnography

“Multiracial Youth Identity Meta-Ethnography” describes the findings from a meta-ethnography of research accounts about Multiracial identity development in young adults. This chapter examines eight purposefully selected studies about Multiracial identity uncovering how identity theories are being deployed in qualitative studies of mixed-race youth and what is revealed in the collective that may be obscured when each study is independently evaluated. These themes came to the fore: (a) fluid identities, (b) isolation from “monoracial” individuals and communities, and (c) the importance of place/space for Multiracial people. The analysis also revealed (a) a lack of attendance to intersectionality in both participants’ identities and authors’ positionalities and (b) the absence of attention to Whiteness and White supremacy in discussing Multiraciality, a discursive strategy the authors call Whiteblindness. This meta-ethnography revealed that researchers’ paradigmatic perspectives and theoretical frameworks impact the framing of problems and solutions related to understanding and working with Multiracial youth.