‘Mutts like Me’: Multiracial Students’ Perceptions of Barack Obama

Existent sociological studies of multiracialism in the United States focus on identity construction, the cultural and legislative battle over multiracial categorization, and the implications of demographic shifts towards an increasingly ??mixed race?? population. This article engages literature from each of these areas, and uses data from in-depth interviews with self-identified multiracial students to document their perceptions of President Barack Obama and trace the symbolic boundaries of multiracial identity. Interviews are specifically directed towards the influence of race on Obama??s identity management and political career, the relationship between Obama and respondents?? multiracial identity, and Obama??s impact on America??s racial history. Respondents hold favorable opinions of the President despite his inconsistent affirmation of multiracial identity. They believe that emphasis on Obama??s blackness rather than multiracialism is the unfortunate result of both personal choices and political pressures. In addition, the cohort insists that racism remains is a major factor in Obama??s career and in America at large.     

“Being Raised by White People”: Navigating Racial Difference Among Adopted Multiracial Adults

There are increasing numbers of multiracial families created through marriage, adoption, birth, and a growing population of multiracial persons. Multiracials are a hidden but dominant group of transracially adopted children in both the United Kingdom and the United States. This paper introduces findings from an interpretive study of 25 transracially adopted multiracials regarding a set of experiences participants called “being raised by White people.” Three aspects of this experience are explored: (1) the centrality yet absence of racial resemblance, (2) navigating discordant parent‐child racial experiences, and (3) managing societal perceptions of transracial adoption. Whereas research suggests some parents believe race is less salient for multiracial children than for Black children, this study finds participants experienced highly racialized worlds into adulthood.     

Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness? A Look at the Marital Patterns of Part‐White Multiracial Groups

Using a boundary perspective (Alba and Nee 2003 ), I examine the marital behavior of three self‐identified multiracial groups: black/whites, American Indian/whites, Asian/whites. With a focus on marriage with whites, I assess whether the boundaries of whiteness are expanding to include these part‐white multiracial groups. Marrying whites at a large scale may signify that part‐white multiracial Americans are in the process of being accepted as “white.” At the same time, due to differences in the racial identity experiences of multiracial groups, marital patterns may differ by racial combination. Based on analysis of 2008–2012 American Community Survey data, I find that the majority of all three groups are married to whites, suggesting that most members in these groups are on the path to whiteness. On the other hand, multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrates that American Indian/whites and Asian/whites are more likely than black/whites to have a white spouse, relative to spouses of another race/ethnicity. Moreover, separate regression analyses by multiracial group reveal gender differences in their likelihood of marrying whites for black/whites and Asian/whites. These results indicate racial stratification in the marriage market among part‐white multiracial Americans, with further stratification by gender for some groups.     

The Role of Racial Identification,Social Acceptance/Rejection,Social Cognition,and Racial Socialization in Multiracial Youth’s Positive Development

Deficit‐based scholarship has suggested that multiracial youth are maladjusted due to racial identity confusion and social marginality. This paper proposes an integrative model of multiracial youth’s positive development. This model highlights the important role of social cognition in understanding multiracial youth’s development. Drawing on Spencer’s PVEST, developmental research on monoracial and multiracial youth, and the racial socialization literature, I argue that multiracial youth’s perceptions of how their racial identity choices are accepted in their social environment have implications for their adjustment. Serving as developmental resources, parents can attenuate their children’s social perceptual biases or enhance their abilities to cope with actualized negative social experiences by engaging in cultural socialization, preparation for bias, and transmitting race‐related messages that help multiracial children reframe their negative perceptions.     

“WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?” The Psychological and Social Well‐Being of Multiracial Adolescents

We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the social and psychological well-being of multiracial adolescents. Using two different measures of multiracial identity, we investigated the ways in which these adolescents compare to their monoracial counterparts on five outcomes: depression, seriously considering suicide, feeling socially accepted, feeling close to others at school, and participating in extracurricular activities. We found that multiracial adolescents as a group experience some negative outcomes compared to white adolescents, but that this finding is driven by negative outcomes for those with American Indian and white heritage. We found no consistent evidence, however, that multiracial adolescents as a group face more difficulty in adolescence than members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. The results were similar, whether the multiracial population is defined by self-identification or by their parents' racial identifications.     

Methodology and Measurement in the Study of Multiracial aMericans: Identity,Classification, and Perceptions

This article lays out some of the methodological issues in doing research on multiracial people (those whose immediate and/or distant ancestors come from different racial or ethnic groups), including how they are counted, how they are perceived, how they identify themselves, what factors affect their self‐identifications, and how their identifications change over time.     

Raising multiracial awareness in family therapy through critical conversations

Multiracial families are uniquely affected by racial dynamics in U.S. society. Family therapists must be prepared to meet the needs of this growing population and to support racial equity. This article includes an overview of literature related to being multiracial and offers a framework for working with multiracial identity development in therapy. A critical conversation approach to working with multiracial identity is shared along with case examples. The authors' experiences developing the model via a practitioner inquiry group are highlighted.     

Desiring the standard light skin: black multiracial boys,masculinity and exotification

Although studies of the multiracial population have long identified the connection between multiraciality and exotification, much of the focus has been on the exotification of multiracial women that are part-white. Consequently, most understandings of exotification in this literature are insufficient to account for how a broader multiracial demographic is exotified and the mechanisms of exotification that are specific to mixed-race bodies. This article analyses black multiracial boys’ experiences of exotification in Northern California. Interviews with the boys revealed how interactions around their multiraciality intimately linked perceptions of their attractiveness to their mixedness. Their physical features, behaviours and dispositions were dissected according to their multiple racial backgrounds in ways that rendered them desirably hybridised. The interaction of black masculinity with their other racialised masculinities is essential to understanding the construction of the black multiracial male as desirable, pointing to the critically important yet understudied intersection of mixedness and masculinity.     

An Examination of Social Science Literature Pertaining to Multiracial Identity

ABSTRACT

This article traces the history of the construct, multiracial identity, within social science literature. This research evolves from an emphasis on demonstrating the inferiority of multiracial individuals to understanding their phenomenological experiences. Over time, the emphasis seems to shift from categorizing by race to a focus on ethnicity. The method of inquiring about racial identity appears to have shifted from behavioral observation to self-report. Empirical research examining this phenomenon also seems to become more methodologically rigorous over time. Historically, the struggle to understand multiracial individuals as either marginal or healthy may have been more the result of ethnocentric beliefs on the part of the researchers rather than the identification process of multiracial individuals. It is additionally urged that further research continue to explore this often overlooked and misrepresented subgroup.     

Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

In 2010, approximately nine million Americans self‐identified with more than one race on the U.S. Census – a 32 percent increase since 2000. In this paper, I review the growing body of research on this population, with a particular focus on identifying and describing factors important in shaping their racial identities. Factors explored include: social norms regarding racial classification, socioeconomic status, racial composition of one’s neighborhood and community, region, socialization by family, age, cohort, genealogical locus of multiracial ancestry, nativity, and phenotype. I discuss the broader implications of findings to‐date, with a particular focus on the ongoing scholarly discourse regarding the collection of race data in the United States.     

Ethnic Chinese in Malaysian citizenship: gridlocked in historical formation and political hierarchy

The ethnic Chinese in Malaysia are a significant minority who call for a critical assessment as far as their cultural identity and political positioning are concerned. Appropriating the concept of ‘multicultural citizenship’, this article attempts to dissect various demands and aspirations of the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia’s multiracial hierarchy. It suggests that using the lens of multicultural citizenship can help shed light on Malaysian Chinese as well as the entire nation, where ethnicity and citizenship are gridlocked in historical formation and political hierarchy. In recent times, Malaysian Chinese have articulated their political desires and demands in order to get rid of the disgrace of racial constraints, and also to envisage a more inclusive multicultural citizenship for Malaysia as a nation-state. This article also compares and contrasts three Chinese public figures who have taken disparate stands and approaches with regard to language, culture, race, nation, and party politics.     

Personality Characteristic Adaptations: Multiracial Adolescents' Patterns of Racial Self‐Identification Change

For multiracial adolescents, forming a sense of self and identity can be complicated, even at the level of classifying themselves in terms of racial group membership. Using a Race Self Complexity ( Winston et al., 2004 ) theoretical framework, this study used an open‐ended question to examine the racial self‐identification fluidity of 66 adolescents during the 7th, 8th, and 11th grades. This sample included 22 Black/White 1 multiracial adolescents, as well as a matched sample of 22 Black and 22 White adolescents. Seventy‐three percent of the multiracial adolescents changed their racial self‐identification in the form of two time change patterns with a number of consolidating and differentiating racial self‐identification variations. There was no change for the monoracial adolescents. These results suggest that within the lives of multiracial adolescents, the process of racial self‐identification may be a personality characteristic adaptation to the meaning of race in American society that may change across time, place, and role.     

Sport and Social Inequalities

This article reviews recent research on the relationship between sport and social inequalities, focusing on gender, race, nation and social mobility. Through an engagement with these areas of research, we highlight how sport reflects and reinforces broader hierarchical structures; how it serves as a site for both inclusion and exclusion, but in ways that work unevenly; and how sport is ultimately a site for social reproduction of hierarchy and social stratification. We argue that the gender, racial and national hierarchies that sport is embedded within interact to largely prevent sport from being a site for social mobility, despite popular myths to the contrary.     

Assimilation as multiracialism: The case of Singapore's Malays

The myths of meritocracy and multiracialism ‘explain’ between them both the ‘fairness’ of the Singapore system and the subordinate role of the non-Chinese minority races. They also purport to assure the minorities that they enjoy full status as members of the nation-building project and that their cultural and religious mores are embraced and protected within its framework. Using the Malay minority as its case study, and arguing from archival, oral, official government and secondary sources, this paper argues that the Singapore systems of meritocracy and multiracialism have not been concerned primarily with intercommunal tolerance since the 1970s, but are now programmes of assimilation of the racial minorities into a Chinese-dominated society.     

"IF YOU'RE HALF BLACK, YOU'RE JUST BLACK": Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule

Despite growing interest in multiracial identity, much of the research remains atheoretical and limited in its approach to measuring identity. Taking a multidimensional approach to identity and drawing on reflected appraisals (how they think others see them), I examine racial identity among black-white adults in the South and the lingering influence of the one-drop rule. Most respondents internally identify as black and when asked to explain these black identities, they describe how both blacks and whites see them as black. I argue that the one-drop rule still shapes racial identity, namely through the process of reflected appraisals.     

The Integration of Racial and Ethnic Minorities into White Congregations

Drawing from the homophily principle and organizational ecology theory, I follow previous literature and predict racial minorities will have lower levels of belonging and commitment when attending predominantly white congregations. Going beyond this literature, I incorporate contemporary racial stratification literature and propose integration into white congregations would vary by racial group as a result of the differing symbolic group positioning of minorities in America's racial hierarchy. Results from multilevel models using a national dataset generally support my hypotheses. The findings from this study reveal distinctions between minority racial groups within predominantly white congregations. Thus, the homophily principle and organizational ecology are not sufficient when studying race within congregations, as it is not enough to rely solely on the numeric representation of racial groups in congregations without taking into account the social positioning of these groups. These results, their implications, and potential directions for future studies are further discussed.     

American children in multiracial households

This study provides a demographic portrait of multiracial households, using children as the units of analysis. The authors conceptualize 3 dimensions for understanding multiracial qualities: 1) the racial composition of a household overall, 2) where in the household a racial difference exists relative to the household head, and 3) where in the household a racial difference exists relative to each child. Using microdata from the 1980 US census, the authors explore the 1st 2 of these dimensions and test 2 propositions about the links between racial diversity and other nonracial attributes of children's household environments. The finding is made, among other things, that the largest proportion of children live in Asian-white households, and that about 60% live in households headed by mixed-race couples. Support for the notion that attributes of multiracial households fall between those of their same-race counterparts was mixed. Nonetheless, there appears to be a link between location of diversity and some nonracial characteristics of household.     

What is new with old? What old age teaches us about inequality and stratification

Aging is remarkably unequal. Who survives to grow old in America and the circumstances they face once there reflect durable racial, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities that structure our lives from birth. Yet within the field of social stratification and mainstream sociology proper, examinations of the rapidly growing population of older Americans are often relegated to a “gerontological” periphery. This essay posits that the failure to place aging as a core concern in stratification and inequality is a missed opportunity. We argue for the importance of reintegrating studies on the stratification of aging and explain why such a move is necessary. Specifically, we posit that (a) examining the aging population is necessary for understanding American inequality because aging is an outcome that is ubiquitous yet highly stratified; (b) aging and being seen as “old” in a youth‐focused society are stratifying processes in their own right; and (c) later life provides for analytical comparisons that are illustrative of how key mechanisms of inequality structure and stratify. After examining insights provided by a new wave of research on the aging U.S. population, we revisit the implications for understanding inequality and stratification in a graying and unequal America.     

The demographic transformation and the sociological enterprise

The dramatic demographic changes of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States are creating a multiracial, multicultural society. This article examines the intellectual challenges for sociology posed by the emerging racial diversity brought about by these population trends. The problem is that conventional sociological frameworks no longer apply in this increasingly complex social world of rapid population changes, diversity, and polarization. Most significant, conventional American sociology, which has focused on white society rooted in western culture, is challenged by three large racial/ethnic categories. We argue that diversity must be incorporated into our sociologies. This requires two new approaches: (1) Sociology must be recentered, that is, it must move away from the notion that whites have the universal experience against which all others are measured; and (2) Sociologists must apply to diverse populations the same kind of sociological analysis that they apply to mainstream categories. This means that we demythologize by dispelling common myths about those outside the mainstream and that we uncover the mechanisms that construct social differences.