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

Courtney Meiling Jones,Leoandra Onnie Rogers

doi:10.3390/socsci11010019

Abstract

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.

Highlights

A persistent racial narrative in the United States is that multiracial folks are going to solve racism, or are even evidence that we are living in a post-racial society (DaCosta 2020; Mizrahi 2020; Velasquez-Manoff 2017)
Recent ecological developmental perspectives of identity recognize the need to incorporate a systematic analysis of the impacts of structural racism and white supremacy on identity development (e.g., Galliher et al 2017; Moffitt et al 2021; Rogers 2018; Rogers et al 2021b; Williams et al 2020), but multiracial adolescents and the construction of multiracial identity are scarcely represented in these conversations
We observe that the macrosystem of white supremacy is inseparable from the process of racial socialization that occurs at the interpersonal levels of family and peers (e.g., Rogers et al 2021a), as evidenced in the everyday messages that multiracial youth receive from others

Summary

Introduction

A persistent racial narrative in the United States is that multiracial folks are going to solve racism, or are even evidence that we are living in a post-racial society (DaCosta 2020; Mizrahi 2020; Velasquez-Manoff 2017). Challenge to ahistoricism underscores the importance of contextualizing contemporary experiences of people of color within historical legacies of oppression in order to expose the continued effects of those legacies. This tenet is foundational to understanding the ways in which society and science have historically constructed and studied multiracialness—as a category, an experience, an identity—in ways that uphold and reify the racial hierarchy that is premised on white supremacy. Multiraciality was framed as “marginal”, leading inevitably to racial homelessness and emotional and psychological distress (Park 1928; Stonequist 1935) Through this construction of the “Marginal Man” as troubled and dysfunctional, researchers used science to implicitly warn people away from cross-racial relationships or multiracial identities

Results

Discussion

Conclusion