Racial Identity Formation Research Articles

44.4 UPLIFTING LATINES YOUTH TO OVERCOME THE IMPACT OF XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM ON THEIR RACIAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES

This presentation aims to provide an opportunity to learn about the history of xenophobia and racism against Latines in the United States, and to allow participants to gain a better understanding of how these experiences shape different aspects of Latine youth identity. Participants will also learn about cultural humility and competence as fundamental practices in working with Latines. We will present a brief overview on the history of xenophobia and racism against Latines in the United States, including a short video of the 2010 Medal of Freedom awardee, Sylvia Mendez, sharing her experience in the process of desegregating schools in California. Important constructs in the process of identity formation for Latine youth and the impact of discrimination and racism in this process will be explained. We will use selected clinical vignettes to illustrate this impact. To finalize, attendees will have the opportunity of engaging in an exercise to reflect on their own identity and understand the importance of cultural competence and humility when working with Latines. Discrimination and racism can be experienced by individuals that are identified as “Hispanic or Latino” in the United States. The history of xenophobia and racism against Latines in this country is best documented through the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. Thus, the historical review will primarily focus on this group, which continues to comprise the largest number of Latines in the country. Among Latines, it is important to understand the role of acculturation and acculturative stress in the process of identity formation, as experiences of discrimination and racism get internalized and impact youth mental health. Understanding this developmental process, as well as the historic and current experiences of marginalized groups, is critical to provide culture-centered and culture-affirming care. The practice of cultural humility and competence guides providers in this process and is essential in the therapeutic relationship with Latine youth. Xenophobia and racism have influenced Latine racial and ethnic identity formation since the 19th century, and the lingering political climate continues to reinforce this process. Child and adolescent psychiatrists have a critical role in uplifting marginalized youth and help heal intergenerational wounds.

Sites of Sanctuary: Examining Blackness as “Something Fugitive” Through the Tactical Use of Ethnic Clubs by Haitian Immigrant High School Students

In this theoretical article, the authors elaborate a revisited theory of Third Space from a BlackCrit/Afropessimist stance, exploring Black youth ethnic and racial identity formation searching for place and belonging in the context of a raced world. To illustrate their theoretical contributions, the authors draw on empirical research conducted with Haiti-born and U.S.-born Haitian immigrant high school students and their teachers. They argue that, as Third Space, Haitian ethnic clubs were sites of sanctuary where students felt free to challenge, play with, and question complex ideas about racial identity, sites of resistance to test and exercise resistance against demoralizing forces, sites of fluidity for Black adolescent development, and sites for regulating and protecting Blackness. Thus, Third Space Theory from a BlackCrit perspective can offer an anti-racist approach to capturing how Black youth become aware of contradictions and ambivalence in the worlds they inhabit and their acceptance of situations where ambivalence helps in their learning and also their survivance.

Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism, by Molly Littlewood Mckibbin

Reviewed by: Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism by Molly Littlewood McKibbin Wendy Braun (bio) MOLLY LITTLEWOOD MCKIBBIN, Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism. University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xi + 331 pp. ISBN 9780803296817. Mixed-race people have always existed, but are treated as an emerging phenomenon. While multicultural studies investigates the experiences and perceptions of mixed-race individuals from past to present, it has often fallen short of analyzing the role Whiteness plays in the construction of mixed-race identities, thereby leaving Whiteness unchallenged as a hegemonic racial category. Molly Littlewood McKibben fills this chasm in mixed-race studies by analyzing six texts that include an interracial protagonist with both Black and White parentage and in doing so, incorporates a more overt examination of Whiteness in the construction of racial identity and how this is depicted in contemporary multiracial literature. McKibben begins her monograph by clearly outlining her working definitions and providing a detailed primer of mixed-race history in the United States. This is important for two main reasons: it demonstrates the slipperiness of racial terms and highlights the often contradictory and ever-evolving ways these labels have been used socially, legally, and scientifically over time. In addition, McKibben notes that multicultural scholars often neglect to make clear their definitions or uncritically slip from one connotation to another, which does little to clear up misconceptions of race and inconsistencies in racial theory. The sample of texts, while analyzing mixed-race Black and White identity, also trouble the concept of Whiteness in ways previously unexamined. Whereas early mixed-race literature focused on the tragic mulatto/a character (an individual denied identity and community) or passing narratives (individuals choosing a tenuous and dangerous inclusion into White society), more contemporary iterations have focused on those same individuals forming racial identity and establishing community through Black pride and political activism. McKibben has chosen first-person coming-of-age narratives that reveal racial identity formation for mixed-race individuals, where the characters also explore their understanding of [End Page 145] both Blackness and Whiteness and what that means for their interracial identities. These texts include Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001), Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter (2005), Rachel Harper’s Brass Ankle Blues (2006), and Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010). In chapter 1, McKibben focuses on the works of Harper, Raboteau, Senna, and Walker. In these narratives, the protagonists do not want to default to the one-drop rule of Blackness and do not view Black pride as simultaneously denying the White part of their identities. However, their racial formation is often molded and even impeded by those around them, including family and friends, as well as the imposing gaze of strangers and acquaintances. These texts highlight the limitations of US racial terminology, especially for mixed-race individuals. Whereas the tragic mulatto/a figure emphasized the mental fracture of the Black-White multiracial person, these more contemporary texts expose that the problem lies with the “pathology of the country” (p. 74). Chapter 2 centers on the works of Senna and Walker, which explore ethnic Whiteness and highlight it as a constructed and performed identity. The narratives, which incorporate Latinx and Jewish identities, respectively, destabilize Whiteness as a homogenous, unracialized, and invisible category—one that is “pure” and somehow incompatible with Blackness. Building on this notion, chapter 3 focuses on the works of Harper, Raboteau, Walker, and Senna, who discuss multiethnic Blackness and colorism as Black identity is pitted against White in the lives of Black-White multiracials. These texts also demonstrate how psychologically and emotionally taxing it is for mixed-race individuals to navigate their own racial identities under daily microaggressions and cultural pathology. The protagonists learn the importance of diverse communities where they are less likely to have to defend or justify their mixed-raced identities. It is in these spaces that the characters often learn more inclusive vocabulary that encapsulates their identity, and they are less likely to feel that they have to identify monoracially. This marks a point in the multi-racial coming-of-age narrative...

Carceral Geographies from Inside Prison Gates: The Micro‐Politics of Everyday Racialisation

AbstractAddressing a need for carceral geographical research conducted from inside prison gates, we discuss the spatial context in which racialisation occurs, including its relationship to the performance of prison “politics”. We argue that the convoluted and contentious racial categorisation of prison inmates that begins with “racial priming” and results in “racial sorting” possesses a spatial logic derived from institutional partitioning and street‐level cordoning of individual and group identities. We reveal how racialisation is relied upon through both a self‐segregation and institutional classification system at the micro scale. Based on autoethnographic reflection as formerly jailed and incarcerated individuals, and through a reading of sociological, criminological, and geographical literatures, we argue that the logic of everyday micro‐scale racial identity formation has more to do with location, gang alliances, antagonisms, and the necessary navigating of prison “politics” and protocol than with conceptualisations of “race” engendered by racial capitalism and enforced by the racial state.

“My Uncle's Cousin's Great-Grandma Were a Cherokee” and I am Descended from an Ashanti King: The American Blood Idiom in the Simple Stories

Abstract Langston Hughes satirizes America's obsession with so-called “racial purity” in his stories featuring Jesse B. Semple to shed light upon internalized racism and white American attempts to erase US histories that complicate the standardized black-white color line. In his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1920), the speaker challenges a singular view of the many Black histories that exist through the metaphor of rivers. In his Simple stories, Hughes's character Jesse B. Semple reflects on American Blackness and blood stereotypes that impact racial identity formation and community building. By invoking the “Indian grandmother” and royal African ancestor tropes, Hughes complicates those compartmentalized identities and US histories implied via the American blood idiom to denote associations with enslavement that bolster notions of intraracial difference and white supremacist ideology. Hughes's Simple stories culminate his trajectory in establishing African American pride in African ancestry and an anticolonial rejection of racial purity as a legal and social principle that contributes to monolithic conceptions of American Blackness.

A White Person Problem: Conducting White/White Treatment with a Social Justice Lens

In this paper, I advance the view that racism, experienced as an intrapsychic, interpersonal, cultural and socio-political phenomenon, is fundamentally a problem that white people are responsible for solving. I begin with an assumption that white practitioners, specifically those of us who strive to offer social justice-informed psychodynamic treatment, are responsible for addressing this problem by attending to the relational dynamics that unfold in the consulting room with white clients. I utilize case material from my own practice to explore ways to do this and clinical quandaries that might arise, particularly in cases where the question of race does not explicitly present as a topic of concern. I suggest that there are multiple ways to address racism, as well as other socio-political issues, including investigating how the words we use are culturally and socio-politically determined, investigating in what way our clinical interventions are operating in collusion with or in opposition to parts of a client’s social and familial context (systemic enactment), analyzing and de-centering cultural and social expressions in clients that are reflections of a larger system of racial superiority and oppression, and linking intrapsychic and relational development with racial identity formation.

Racial Reclassification and Political Identity Formation

AbstractThis article leverages a phenomenon of racial reclassification in Brazil to shed new light on the processes of identity politicization. Conventional wisdom tells us that race mixture, fluid racial boundaries, and stigmatized blackness lead Brazilians to change their racial identifications—to reclassify—toward whiteness. But in recent years, Brazilians have demonstrated a newfound tendency to reclassify toward blackness. The author argues that this sudden reversal is the unintended consequence of state-led educational expansion for the lower classes. Educational expansion has increased the exposure of newly mobile citizens to information, social networks, and the labor market, leading many to develop racialized political identities and choose blackness. The author develops and tests this argument by drawing on in-depth interview data, systematic analyses of national survey and longitudinal census data, and original survey experiments. This article contributes a novel account of identity politicization and emphasizes the interaction between social structures and citizenship institutions in these processes.

Just a Unicorn

Kat J. Stephens is a higher education Ph.D. student at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She’s earned a Master of Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, in Higher & Postsecondary Education. Her larger research interests are social justice & identity development. As an Afro-Guyanese immigrant, her research interests reflects: Caribbean students, Afro-Caribbean racial identity formation, transnationalism, Black women students with ADHD & Autism, & gifted community college & transfer students. Her work here is inspired by her life and those of other Black women & girls in educational spaces. This poem serves to highlight her frustrations, while encouraging Black women to take space in disability centered environments, and universities to adequately support such individuals.

Intergenerational Literacies: The Racial, Linguistic, and Cultural Resources of Families in Raising Young Children of Color

In this article, we share findings from three qualitative studies, illustrating how children of color and their families make meaning of the racial, linguistic, cultural, and gendered worlds in which they develop. The first study examines how White adoptive Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) parents engage in race conscious child-rearing of their young African American son and the dialogism of racial identity formation and racial literacies; the second study examines the family literacy learning and teaching practices of one adult English to Speakers of Other Languages student; the third study examines how Latinx parents engage intergenerational sharing of stories as tools of resistance. Utilizing critical race theory, LatCrit theory, and sociocultural perspectives on literacy and intergenerational learning as analytical lenses, this article illuminates the consequential nature of intergenerational learning that occurs through the lived and embodied literacy practices of children and families of color and the implications for literacy researchers and practitioners.

“WHITENESS” IN CONTEXT

AbstractUsing data from the 2008–2016 American Community Survey, we compare the racial identification responses of the Mexican-origin population residing in California to their counterparts in Texas, the two states with the largest and most established Mexican-origin populations. We draw on existing theory and research in order to derive a theoretical account of state-level historical mechanisms that are likely to lead to varying patterns of racial identification within the two states and a set of propositions predicting the nature of this variation. Results indicate that the Mexican-origin population in Texas is substantially more likely to claim White racial identification than their counterparts in California, even after accounting for factors related to racial identity formation. Further analysis indicates that this result is robust and buffets the notion that the historical development of the racial context in Texas has engendered a present-day context in which “Whiteness” carries a distinctive social value, relative to California’s ethnoracial context, and that this social value is reflected in the ways in which individuals of Mexican origin respond to race questions on U.S. Census surveys.

Coloring Racial Fluidity: How Skin Tone Shapes Multiracial Adolescents’ Racial Identity Changes

Research on racial fluidity has become increasingly common as researchers seek to understand the ways and reasons people change their racial identifications and/or are perceived differently over time and across contexts. Concurrently, researchers have deepened their investigations of the attitudinal and identity aspects of “color,” that is the ways that people’s racial and political attitudes vary based on skin tone among members of the same racial group, particularly black Americans. This paper attempts to blend research on racial fluidity and color into an exploration of adolescent racial identity formation. I examine the effect skin tone on the likelihood and type of racial identity change among multiracial black adolescents as they transition into adulthood. My results reveal that lighter skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to a non-black single race, while darker skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to black only.

The Mrs Freer case revisited: marriage, morality and the state in interwar Australia

In October 1936, Australia’s Minister for the Interior, Thomas Paterson, ordered customs officials to bar a married, white British woman travelling with a married army officer from entering Australia. Mabel Freer’s exclusion sparked a media sensation and captured public attention for months. In re-examining the Freer case, this article focuses on questions of morality, respectability and marriage, and how these intertwined with racial identity formation in interwar Australia. Freer’s exclusion struck a chord with the general public, and with women in particular, who condemned Paterson’s action and demanded Freer’s admission. However, while this mobilisation against government overreach successfully challenged the sexual double standard and patriarchal assumptions about marriage and women’s respectability, it simultaneously reinforced the racist logic underpinning the White Australia policy.

A tale of two “halfs”: being black, while being biracial

Using counter-storytelling, this manuscript provides auto-ethnographies from two Black-biracial scholars. The authors’ narratives present an intimate account of how being half - Black is experienced by Black-biracial individuals. Specifically, this study details the accounts of how two Black-biracial scholars, who don’t fit into the rigid Black-white racial binaries of American society, construct their racial identity through intra- and inter-group conflict. Their counter-stories demonstrate how Black-biracial individuals must navigate the intersections of their racial identity formation while attempting to find solace in a racialized world with limited biracial examples. Their stories detail multiple intersections of racial acceptance and rejection from those within the Black community and outside of it; as well as the intersections of sexuality, the meaning of being Black, being a nigga, affirmation and otherness from non-biracial people, which all culminate to highlight the lives of those who are considered half something, but racially incomplete.

The Importance of Racial Socialization: School-Based Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity Among African American Adolescent Boys and Girls.

This study examined various parental racial socialization messages as mediators between school-based racial discrimination and racial identity formation over 4years for African American boys (N=639) and African American girls (N=711). Findings indicated that school-based racial discrimination was associated with racial identity beliefs. For African American boys, behavioral racial socialization messages mediated the relation between school-based racial discrimination and racial centrality over time. Mediation also resulted for African American girls, but for a different set of race-related messages (negative messages and racial barriers) and racial identity beliefs. The developmental significance of the findings and implications for future research are discussed.

Race, Wars, and Citizenship: Free People of Color in the Spanish American Independence.

The role played by free people of color in the Spanish American independence movements is at the center of this essay. Their ambiguous status makes them a privileged group to study when examining the negotiation and formation of racial identity as well as the definition of citizenship requirements in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Through an analysis of the contributions made by recent studies, this article proposes a historiographical survey of the transformation of racial and social hierarchies and of the shaping of new citizenship rights during the crisis of the Spanish Empire and the independence wars.

A path analysis of a cultural and racial socialization model in international transracial adoption: Racial awareness, self-efficacy, and socialization practices

The purpose of this study was to test a conceptual model using path analysis to examine direct and indirect relationships among factors contributing to transracial adoptive parents' cultural and racial socialization practices. Participants, responding to an online survey, were White mothers and fathers of children born in China and other Asian and non-Asian countries, and were associated with Families with Children from China, a support group. Included in a path analysis were 310 cases. As hypothesized, post-adoption education and support, racial awareness, and socialization self-efficacy were found to be important factors that positively influenced socialization practices. Researchers may be interested in further examination of the cultural and racial socialization model to address the parenting needs of international transracial adoptive parents, and ultimately to support the healthy ethnic and racial identity formation of transracial adoptees.

A New Research Agenda for the Study of Genetic Ancestry Tests and the Formation of Racial and Ethnic Identities and Ancestries

This paper sets out a new research agenda for the study of family historians’ (referred to as ‘genealogists’) use of genetic ancestry tests in the course of their family history research in postcolonial Britain. My focus is upon the ways in which the use of these tests shapes the formation of genealogists’ ethnic, racial, national, class and gender identities and their ancestries. I argue that, while there is some significant and important work on the ways in which African Americans and white Americans deploy these tests to trace their family histories, there is little comparable work in the context of postcolonial Britain. Drawing on sociological, anthropological and geographical research on identity, genetic ancestry testing and family history research, I set out some of the theoretical issues that research in this area in Britain should address, and outline possible methodologies and methods that will serve to bridge this gap in the current literature on race, ethnicity, identity and genealogy.

From Ferguson to Charleston and beyond: Talking about race and diversity in the classroom

ABSTRACTCourses: News Reporting, Advertising, Strategic Communication, Media Studies, Introduction to Communication, Intercultural and Interracial Communication, Business Communication, and Hybrid Public Speaking.Objectives: This module facilitates a process for students to interrogate how they relate to the public and to understand the profound implication of past policies on today’s communities, thereby engaging in productive race talk. Through five successive parts, students are better prepared for effective conversations about race and diversity by: (1) moving progressively toward understanding racial and ethnic identity formation; (2) exploring intersectionality (the oppression resulting from compounding effects of multiple identities) and relative power as it relates to broader socioeconomic, political, and environmental structures; and (3) the historicization of power, privilege, and oppression.

Dismantling Purity: Toward a Feminist Curdling of Hawaiian Identity

This paper explores Hawaiian racial identity formation using María Lugones’s metaphor of curdling as a guiding theme. I aim to show that the accepted definition of “native Hawaiian” is based on a purity model of race that serves to undermine the unity of the Hawaiian Nation. I begin by outlining the pre-contact understanding of Hawaiian identity. This conception of identity was subsequently altered through various political agendas to fit within a Western/European notion of “pure” racial identity. I argue that continuing to use the imposed definition of “native Hawaiian” makes the fragmentation of Hawaiian identity and society difficult to overcome. Additionally, I offer a discussion of the gendered rhetoric of some Hawaiian activists that complicates the effort to regain a precolonial cultural identity that was largely egalitarian. Finally, I suggest that a rejection of racial purity and a rearticulation of Hawaiian identity that recaptures pre-contact, strategic notions of belonging by way of Lugones’s “impure resistance” can set the stage for a more inclusive Hawaiian Nation.

The School to Deportation Pipeline: The Perspectives of Immigrant Students and Their Teachers on Profiling and Surveillance within the School System

Ample research has identified links between school and the criminal justice system; our work builds on these studies by identifying the pathway to deportation that immigrant students face. Our qualitative study, conducted in seven U.S. cities, focused on recent immigrant students and their teachers in secondary education institutions. We evaluated the intersection of race and immigrant backgrounds to understand their compounded effects on racialization processes. We found that racial identity formation among recent immigrants is shaped by experiences of tracking and profiling within the school system as well as surveillance practices around school spaces. We argue that racialization—the process by which students come to be regarded (by themselves or the broader society) as a part of the U.S. racial paradigm—is a critical mechanism by which immigrant students enter a school to prison to deportation pipeline.