“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.

Identification of Multiracial Adolescents in Research Samples: An Examination and Critique of Existing Practices

This study examined caregivers’ longitudinal reports of adolescent multiracial categorization across the ages of 9.5, 10.5, and 14 years, and adolescents’ reports of their own multiracial categorization at the age of 14 years. A portion of caregivers’ reports of adolescent multiracial status were inconsistent across the years of the study; some adolescents’ and caregivers’ responses differed when questions assessing multiracial status were phrased in different ways; and adolescent and caregiver reports did not always align when adolescents were 14 years old. Given these findings, we recommend that researchers consider using multiple methods of racial data collection and collapsing the results to report estimated ranges of racial representation in samples, rather than specific percentages. Furthermore, when racial data must be provided by a single informant in the context of early adolescence, we suggest that researchers should think critically about which group’s perspective, adolescents’ or caregivers’, is more relevant to the research questions at hand.