Liminality in the Multiracial experience: towards a concept of identity matrix

Abstract

Although researchers have investigated Multiracials for their racial identity ‘choices’, many scholars continue to conceptualise racial identity as monolithic. This article both problematises and extends the notion of racial identity with an ‘identity matrix’. This concept grounds the sociological processes of constructing and deploying a racial identity as strategic and agentic in interactional, political, cultural, physical (embodiment) and institutional contexts. Using insights from survey data from 231 black-white Multiracial young adults and follow-up in-depth interviews with 24 of these respondents, we develop the concept of ‘identity matrix’ both theoretically and empirically. This article provides heuristic results that we hope will encourage more development of methodological and theoretical complexity in the study of racial identity, allowing scholars to think about the various identities of Multiracials, the possibility of and conditions enabling an emergent Multiracial consciousness, as well as the socio-cognitive structure and active deployment of identity matrices across other social groups.