“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.

Support for the Ecological Framework for Understanding Multiracial Identity using Latent Profile Analysis

The current study presents a statistical model of the roles of racial identity, racial identification, and racial category under the ecological framework for understanding multiracial identity. The purposes of this study were threefold: (1) to identify distinct profiles of how multiracials understand their racial identity using latent profile analysis; (2) to investigate whether racial identification variables predicted profile membership; and (3) to examine whether profile membership differentiated multiracials across racial category and adjustment outcomes. Using a sample of 269 multiracial adults (77% female, Mage = 23.10) recruited from a southwestern university in 2018, we identified three profiles of racial identity orientations: Singular-oriented (9%; n = 23), Border-oriented (45%; n = 120), and Protean-oriented (47%; n = 126). The Singular-oriented profile was characterized by the highest level of racial distance, and the lowest levels of multiracial pride, challenges with racial identity, and creating a third space. The Border-oriented profile was characterized by the lowest level of racial distance, and the highest level of multiracial pride. The Protean-oriented profile was characterized by the highest levels of racial conflict, challenges with racial identity, and shifting racial expressions. Several racial identification variables significantly predicted profile membership, including gender, Black racial heritage, and perceived racial ambiguity. Furthermore, the three racial identity profiles predicted variation in racial typology choices, proximity to whiteness, distress, collective efficacy, and sense of belonging. These findings attest to the importance of using person-centered techniques to empirically support the ecological framework for understanding multiracial identity.

A Review of White-Centering Practices in Multiracial Research in Social Psychology

Multiracial people—those whose racial ancestry is comprised of two or more races—have always had a presence in the United States. However, since the recent U.S. Census shift to allow people to identify with multiple racial groups, social psychologists have shown increased interest in multiracial identity. However, we argue multiracial research tends to emphasize the perceptions, thoughts, and interests of White people through White-centering research practices, which reproduces racial inequality. To understand how multiracial research within social psychology has been shaped by White-centering research practices, we reviewed literature in social psychology examining multiraciality. We show that White-centering practices exist within this literature and explore how White-centering research practices lead to misrepresentations of the conclusions that may be drawn from multiracial research, underscoring how these conclusions affirm racial power, or Whiteness. We suggest Critical Race Psychology as a possible framework to help dismantle the affirmation of Whiteness in multiracial research.

Sociology of Multiracial Identity in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s: The Failure of a Perspective

Sociologists largely failed to comprehend the emergence of multiracial identities in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was due, in part, to hypodescent and the monoracial imperative. These social devices, respectively, categorize offspring of interracial unions between Whites and people of color based exclusively on the background of color, and necessitate single-racial identification. This has prohibited the articulation and recognition of multiracial identities. Hypodescent and the monoracial imperative are so normative that they have been taken for granted by sociologists across the monoracial spectrum, much as the larger society. Sociology’s espoused objectivity blinded sociologists to the standpoint of their own monoracial subjectivity. They provided little critical examination of hypodescent and the monoracial imperative in terms of their impact on multiracial identity formations. Some sociologists challenged theories of marginality, which stressed the psychological dysfunction of multiracials. Yet multiracial identities were considered symptomatic of mainly isolated psychological concerns with personal identity. Sociologists were absent from analyses of collective identity and agency speaking to mixed-race concerns. Consequently, they remained on the periphery of social scientific theorizing of multiracial identities in terms of their wider-ranging implications.

Recognition

Being multiracial can be a contradictory experience characterized by misperception and a lack of agency; however, embracing multiple identities can constitute an internal revolution of consciousness. This internal revolution of consciousness cannot occur without a societal recognition of multiracial identity. There needs to be a substantive social understanding of multiracial identity in order for true recognition to occur. Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas serves as an opening anecdote to this chapter as it illustrates multiplicity, which can characterize multiracial consciousness. Racial identity and multiracial identity are explored through Linda Alcoff’s Visible Identities, which also establishes the need for a substantive social understanding of mixed-race identity. An internal revolution of consciousness can be developed through Sarah Ahmed’s notion of queerness in Queer Phenomenology and Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness in Borderlands: La Frontera. The parallels between queerness and a mixed-race consciousness are further explored in this chapter to embody new ways of being and seeing the world.