essay about being mixed race

Filed under:

The loneliness of being mixed race in America

“I had to figure out the language to describe myself”: 6 mixed-race people on shifting how they identify.

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: The loneliness of being mixed race in America

This is part one of Vox First Person’s exploration of multiracial identity in America. Read part two here and part three here .

In 1993, the cover of Time bore a digitally rendered face, a supposed “mix of several races” that created a lightly tinted brown-skinned woman. “The New Face of America,” the headline proclaimed, heralded a future where interracial marriages held the promise of a raceless society of beige-colored people.

Almost 30 years later, the United States is getting ready to inaugurate its first female vice president, who is of Black and South Asian descent; the nation has already sworn in its first multiracial and Black president, Barack Obama. By 2013, 10 percent of all babies had parents who were different races from each other, and the number is only growing : In a 2015 Pew study, nearly half of all multiracial Americans were under 18 years old.

Demographically at least, Time’s cover story seems to have gotten it right. But inherent to their vision was a kind of multiracial utopia free of racial strife. This is a popular modern understanding of mixed-race identity. But multiracial people have long been targets of fear and confusion, from suspicions of mixed people “passing” as white under the Jim Crow system to accusations of not embracing one’s “race” enough — something Kamala Harris experienced on multiple sides this past election. Research has shown that, even today, monoracial people experience mixed people as more “cognitively demanding” than fellow monoracial people.

As the mixed population grows in size, it will likely continue to serve as projections for people to sort through America’s complex race relations. But what about the experiences of those who are actually multiracial? Studies illustrate a group of people who struggle with questions of identity and where to fit in, often feeling external pressures to “choose” a side. There’s evidence that mixed-race people have higher rates of mental health issues and substance abuse , too.

As Black Lives Matter protests swept the country in 2020, the issue of race came to the forefront of the national conversation. Everywhere, Americans engaged in deep discussions around the experience of Black and other non-white people in our country, including how race impacts the daily lives of all Americans in unequal ways.

Last year, Vox asked people of mixed descent to tell us how they felt about race and if the language about their identities had shifted over time. Among the 70 responses submitted, we read stories of people with vastly different experiences depending on their racial makeup, how their parents raised them, where they lived and where they wound up living, and, perhaps most importantly, how they look. But over and over again, we heard from respondents that they frequently felt isolated, confused about their identity, and frustrated when others attempted to dole them out into specific boxes.

Here are six selected stories, edited for concision and length.

Michael Lahanas-Calderón, 24, based in Berkeley, California

I’ve found terms to identify myself that feel somewhat comfortable but also somewhat unsatisfying. I don’t really know how to account for my mother’s background, which at best could be described as mestizo Colombian. Using the term “person of color” to account for it feels strange, just given what I see when I look in the mirror. But I also feel a kind of obligation not to let the complex mix of identities I inherited from my mother disappear into the whiteness inherited from my father. I don’t really know where that leaves me, to be honest, beyond using broader terms like Latino, Colombian-American, white-passing, mixed, or multiracial.

Race didn’t come up a lot when I was growing up in suburban Ohio. Obviously, there was a Latino population there, but it wasn’t really a huge part of my life, beyond my mother in our home. It wasn’t like the way that Miami has the strong Cuban-American community. It was almost more an issue of whiteness and skin color being associated with some of those terms, which sort of changed the dynamic depending on the environment because I’m white-passing even with like a tan.

My mom went to great lengths to make sure that I could succeed in the US. When I was still quite little, my Spanish skills were actually developing at a better pace than my English ones. That is, until someone suggested to her that if my English skills didn’t improve, I would be at risk of falling behind the other kids and need speech therapy. This really spurred her to take serious action. She read countless books to me every night in English until I was a bookworm who sounded as Midwestern as the rest of my neighbors. To this day, out of all the things she remembers about my academic career, my high marks on English tests are some of the ones she’s proudest of. But I would be remiss if I did not mention the efforts of my mother to teach me about her and my identity, homeland, and culture, too. She always taught me to be fiercely proud of my blended heritage, and to never be afraid to share it with others.

At times it was pretty easy how well I had adjusted to suburban Ohio. I didn’t really think about the consequences of it until I was a little bit older, because it just got easier to not show that heritage. The shift away from that started in college, which was a much more progressive environment. I was sort of encouraged to explore that identity. We had a Latinx affinity group on campus and I think at times it was a little bit difficult for me to relate to others in the group. They were always welcoming, and it wasn’t that I didn’t feel included, but I think it was more that their experiences were so different from mine. The experience of being a Salvadoran American who is brown and grew up in, say, San Francisco with a pretty solid Latino community around them felt so wildly different from a white-passing, half-Colombian, half-American person growing up in suburban Ohio. We didn’t really have a lot in common beyond the shared language.

It’s always been important to me to recognize both parts of my heritage. But I suppose the only one that really felt like it needed exploring was my Colombian side, because I was always within the dominant side of mainstream American culture. I think that at times it almost felt easier, like everyone encourages you to kind of fall into that mainstream culture and assimilate. If you don’t have that kind of connection to a first-gen or community of immigrants who are actually actively forming a social group, it’s very easy to let one side of your heritage — the one that’s not the dominant culture — slip away. It’s kind of one of my regrets, to be honest, and I’ve made an effort as I’ve gotten older to embrace that again.

Abbey White, 29, based in Brooklyn, New York

Right now, and this may change, I identify as a mixed-race Black person. But initially, I identified as bi-racial. I felt like growing up in the environment that I was in, in Cleveland, it was very clear to me that I was Black and I was mixed, but when I moved to New York, that dramatically changed. I got a lot of people not really being able to recognize me on sight. I’ve had to deal with an ethnic ambiguity that I never had to deal with before. So I had to figure out the language that I wanted to use to describe myself.

I think part of that stems from the fact that when I grew up, my dad, who is Black, wasn’t really in my life, so a lot of my Black identity came from the Black people that my mother worked with and the neighborhood that I lived in. But also, my family was so white and, frankly, for as much as I love my mother, racist. My grandfather would not be in the same room with her the entire nine months she was pregnant. He couldn’t even hold me for the first couple months of my life.

I sort of remember realizing my race when I was late elementary school age and I had gotten in trouble at my grandmother’s house. And I remember putting, like, baby powder on my skin and like trying to convince myself for whatever reason that I would not be as in trouble if I looked more like my mom.

I also felt this struggle to feel connected with Black people when I was growing up. I felt often like a conditional Black person, and I think there are some mixed-race Black folks that have a lot of anger about that. When I was younger, I did. But I’ve also come to understand that the idea of being “authentically” Black is literally a response to things like the one drop rule and this white supremacist idea of how we define race and mixed race, and Black identity being tied to sexual violence. So this reclamation of what it means to be Black is a byproduct of racism.

There are also privileges I have that other non-mixed Black people don’t. I am lighter-skinned. I might not be white-passing, but I can pass as something else. Because for some people, I’m “racially ambiguous,” what has happened is I have found myself in situations with white people who feel very comfortable saying things that are not okay. It’s this sort of, “you’re not like other girls.” Like my grandfather wouldn’t even be in the same room with my mom, but then once I came into this world and they realized, “oh, she’s a baby and race has nothing to do with this,” it wasn’t, “we see Black people as human beings and we respect them.” It became: “You’re our Black child. And you’re the exception to the rule. ”

It’s weird being in places with people who try to make you the exception to the rule, and it makes me want to double down. Because I’m not an exception. I think that that has really made me embrace this idea of I am Black. I’m mixed, but I’m Black.

Josh S., 24, based in Brooklyn, New York

I identify as multiracial. There hasn’t really been another term that’s resonated with me in the same way. I like breaking it down a little — my family is white, and then on my dad’s side, I have family in Japan. I think the change in identity from when I was younger is that I actually have the language to describe who I am, which I lacked back then. I only knew that I wasn’t wholly white, but that it was thrown into pretty sharp contrast because I grew up in a town that was like 99 percent white.

Being thought of as Asian was definitely foisted onto me. Because I did relatively well in school, there was a lot of like, “Oh, the Asian got a good math score.” There was something that felt off about that. Later I realized that, well, my race has absolutely nothing to do with how I perform in school. They were creating this entire persona and this cruel game out of where my grandmother came from. Toward the end of high school, there was just this resentment of that part of myself. Not necessarily that I wanted to stop being mixed race, but that I just kind of wanted being treated differently to go away.

Going to college in Washington, DC, gave me that opportunity. Hardly anyone could tell that I was like anything but white. And so for a couple of years there, I got to experience the world without micro-aggressions and the casual racism that I had growing up. I was just able to coast by on whiteness, which was, coming from where I was, a bit of a relief. Of course, this was an environment that I didn’t fit into for a number of other reasons, even if I could present and act white. There was a substantial difference from my rural, more middle-class upbringing as opposed to the white wealthy upbringing many of my peers had. Even being white, it was a different kind of white.

I think after a couple of years of wrestling with, “I’m never going to be white enough or rich enough to fit in with this,” brought me back to trying to reflect more on my grandma and her heritage and my father’s experience. My father identifies as a person of color, but his response to it, especially as he had children, was to sort of push it to the side. For all intents and purposes, my brother and I were raised with no connection to being Japanese, and he didn’t really do anything to encourage it. His experience growing up in rural Minnesota being called every racial slur under the sun, I think there’s trauma there. I think my parents operated to try and raise us to have a better and easier life.

How I identify, and being non-binary, it’s something I’m grappling with constantly. This isn’t to say that my experience is harder than other people’s. But there is that constant vigilance to not, you know, slip into comfortable. As a masculine, white-passing person, life would probably go by fine for me. It’s having that self-awareness and continuously working on the awareness to keep pushing against white supremacy and patriarchy wherever it shows up.

Thema Reed, 27, based in Austin, Texas

I consider myself to be Chicana and Black. On my dad’s side, I’m what a lot of New Mexican people would call Hispanic, which is a pretty generic term. And then my mom is a Black woman who was adopted and raised by a white woman when she was 14. She is still really connected to her Black roots, and we have a big Black family that we’re so very connected to. But there’s kind of a few different layers in there.

I’ve always identified as both, but I definitely felt a lot of pressure to identify or present myself in different ways throughout my life. I’ve heard some Black people say, “Well, mixed people aren’t actually Black.” And I think that a lot of that comes from a feeling that mixed people can maybe turn off their Blackness sometimes or that mixed people have features that may give them privileges. I would also hear things like, “Oh, well, it’s a shame that Thema is not more light-skinned.” It’s like, I’m not Black enough, but I’m simultaneously too Black, you know?

At the same time, people who maybe aren’t Black or who aren’t mixed look at me as a Black woman. It is hard for me to get people to understand that just because I don’t look Chicana doesn’t mean that I’m not. In New Mexico, Chicana culture is such a big thing there, I think that most people in New Mexico identify with it to some extent. So I didn’t face as much judgment for not being “Chicana enough” as I did until I moved away.

When I was in college, I went to Howard, and that really changed the way that I was able to identify with the Black part of me. I had never been in a place where there were so many Black people that looked so many different ways. There were so many mixes, and with so many different countries, so many different socioeconomic backgrounds. I really felt really accepted and loved for the first time.

I think I kind of really grew up as a chameleon and I learned how to code switch and communicate with a lot of different people when I was really young. I think that there’s something special about that. But I think it does come with a cost. I really experienced it from both sides — I’ve experienced colorism, I’ve experienced people saying, “Well, you’re not Black and you’re not Mexican enough.” I feel really strongly connected to both, but at the same time, sometimes I feel like I belong to neither.

Jaymes Hanna, 35, based in Washington, DC

I am a mix of Brazilian and Lebanese descent. I think my identity is very much like a Venn diagram, where I keep moving around those various circles and the overlap keeps changing all the time. The one thing I have kept constant is some sense of mixedness. If I have to put myself in a commonly recognized box, it would be Latino.

I grew up in inner-city Philly, in a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood. I very much connected to those communities and those cultures and tried to do everything to highlight my Latino-ness — from clothes to manner of speech. My father being Lebanese, I think he experienced some prejudices when he moved to the country, given the long history with our region, and was never eager for me to play up that part of my heritage and culture. So growing up in a predominantly Brazilian household, it was just easier to move forward with that, which is another reason why I think I’ve identified as Latino more predominantly.

As I got older and progressed into the engineering world, I sort of shifted. That was probably the first time I was in a very white-dominant setting. I did a lot of stuff to play my Latinoness down until I left for the social impact field where I thought I could sort of reconnect with the Latino pieces of me .

Even now, there’s elements of my identity that don’t get represented so clearly to someone who sees me as an early- to mid-career professional, especially if they’re white. I do get, “Oh, you’re not bad!” especially if I talk about being Latino, growing up in that neighborhood and going to an inner-city public school where I’m treated a certain kind of way by teachers and the powers that be. It’s always frustrating or disappointing because when I hear that, that very much means to me that you don’t see me. Like you want to be comfortable with me in a certain box. You’re not interested in the actual things that have shaped me to be who I am today.

I’ve been called ethnically ambiguous by more than one person. It makes me feel like a blank slate sometimes. But in some ways, it is kind of cool because I feel like if someone’s trying to identify with you or call you one of them, that creates openness to actually connect with people.

Kristina, 43, based in Los Angeles, California

I identify proudly as a multiracial woman and as a woman of color. This is because the world sees me as a woman of color. I’ve never been perceived as a white woman.

I only recently became confident that I could just, in some circumstances, say “I’m Filipino.” I don’t always have to qualify the basis of my identity to everybody. That is very new for me because people always felt the need to say, “You’re only half,” or remind me that I’m also white . But as I’ve gotten older, and just with more recent conversations about race, I’ve come to realize that I don’t care anymore. I am Filipino, I am white. I don’t always have to say all of my mixed percentages to everybody.

When I was younger, I would always qualify everything by saying, “I am half white.” I didn’t want people to think I was trying to co-opt any identities or infringe on anyone’s spaces. In college, friends would take me to Filipino student group meetings, and I just always felt like an imposter, like I didn’t have a right to be there. I don’t know if that’s true or not to this day. I still don’t quite know my place sometimes. I just know I feel at home in the Filipino community with my Filipino family.

At the same time, I didn’t want to feel like that was denying my mom. Even though I don’t identify as a white person, I was raised by a white mom who has a beautiful history and life too. So I don’t like to discount that.

I sort of loathe the inevitable reductive discussions that pop up whenever a multiracial person comes up, whether that’s Kamala Harris or Bruno Mars . I just wish the world knew they don’t get to tell multiracial people how we identify. Each of our own experiences is incredibly unique, depending on who we are raised by, where we were raised, how we look.

I also wish people would stop portraying mixed people as so tragic. I grew up in the ’90s and every discussion about it was about how we were so tortured. It almost seemed like they were putting it out there as a cautionary tale about having multiracial children. But for me, most of the “negative” aspects of being mixed were external, not internal. I absolutely would not change being mixed for the world.

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

The messy legal drama impacting the Bravo universe, explained

X-men ’97 is marvel’s best argument for an x-men animated feature, mega drive-throughs explain everything wrong with american cities, sign up for the newsletter today, explained, thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Student Editorial Contest Winner

Black, White and Somewhere in Between

We are honoring the Top 11 winners of our Student Editorial Contest by publishing their essays. This one is by Louisa Rosenberg-Chiriboga, age 15.

By The Learning Network

This essay, by Louisa Rosenberg-Chiriboga , age 15, from Francis Parker School in San Diego, is one of the Top 11 winners of The Learning Network’s Ninth Annual Student Editorial Contest , for which we received 16,664 entries.

We are publishing the work of all the winners and runners-up over the next week, and you can find them here as they post.

What are you?

I came face to face with the seemingly innocuous question for the first time in third grade when we were asked to check a box citing our race for a standardized test. I paused for a second, hovering over the “White,” “Hispanic/Latino” and “Other” boxes. I thought of my Jewish father, whose family I had spent many Friday night Shabbats with. I thought of my mother, whose Ecuadorean family and culture I had not yet had the opportunity to connect with. I considered my green eyes, brown hair and pale skin, which make people who pass by me view me as white. I chose the “Hispanic/Latino” box, yet I still found myself confused.

This is a universal question for mixed race students around the country. After all, it was not until 2000 that the United States Census Bureau began allowing people of mixed race status to check more than one box regarding their racial identity. But this doesn’t automatically mean that multiracial people — especially young multiracial students — grow up in an environment that understands them and helps them in the process of self-discovery.

These students are often taught in an educational setting that wants to box them neatly into one specific race. This creates a lot of pressure for students to “choose a side” and ultimately leaves them feeling like they do not belong anywhere. While something like being forced to check “Other” on an occasional survey or test may seem trivial, it is an indication of the larger erasure and invalidation of mixed race people’s identities.

According to The New York Times, the population of self-identifying multiracial people has increased 276 percent since the 2010 census, from nine million people to 33.8 million people, or more than 10 percent of the United States’ population. And as the population grows, so does the idea of being mixed race as its own identity.

Obviously, more mixed race people results in more mixed race students, which means that schools need to provide spaces for young, impressionable minds to feel acknowledged and to be able to explore and celebrate their multiple racial identities. Many schools have clubs for supporting students of a singular race (which mixed race students are still encouraged to participate in), however, there are not many organizations available for the unique multiracial experience. Faculty and administrators should work to familiarize themselves with specific mixed race struggles if we as a society want to understand and support this growing population.

We mixed race students are not going away, and like many other issues surrounding students, the education system needs to get in line.

Works Cited

Guzman, Andrea. “ Can You Be ‘White Passing’ Even If You Aren’t Trying? ” Mother Jones, Jan. 2022.

Hegstrom, Sofia. “ All Mixed Up: Multiracial Students at C.V.H.S. Say They Don’t Fit in One Box .” The Upstream, 2 Feb. 2022.

Tavernise, Sabrina, Tariro Mzezewa and Giulia Heyward. “ Behind the Surprising Jump in Multiracial Americans, Several Theories .” The New York Times, 13 Aug. 2021.

The Biracial Advantage

People of mixed race occupy a unique position in the u.s. their experiences of both advantage and challenge may reshape how all americans perceive race..

By Jennifer Latson published May 7, 2019 - last reviewed on December 21, 2020

One of the most vexing parts of the multiracial experience, according to many who identify as such, is being asked, "What are you?" There's never an easy answer. Even when the question is posed out of demographic interest rather than leering curiosity, you're typically forced to pick a single race from a list or to check a box marked "other."

Long before she grew up to be the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle wrestled with the question on a 7th-grade school form. "You had to check one of the boxes to indicate your ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic, or Asian," Markle wrote in a 2015 essay. "There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up but not knowing what to do. You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other—and one half of myself over the other. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. 'Because that's how you look, Meghan.' "

The mother of all demographic surveys, the U.S. census, began allowing Americans to report more than one race only in 2000. Since then, however, the number of people ticking multiple boxes has risen dramatically.

Today, mixed-race marriages are at a high, and the number of multiracial Americans is growing three times as fast as the population as a whole, according to the Pew Research Center. Although multiracial people account for only an estimated 7 percent of Americans today, their numbers are expected to soar to 20 percent by 2050.

This population growth corresponds to an uptick in research about multiracials, much of it focused on the benefits of being more than one race. Studies show that multiracial people tend to be perceived as more attractive than their monoracial peers, among other advantages. And even some of the challenges of being multiracial—like having to navigate racial identities situationally—might make multiracial people more adaptable, creative, and open-minded than those who tick a single box, psychologists and sociologists say.

Of course, there are also challenges that don't come with a silver lining. Discrimination , for one, is still pervasive. For another, many mixed-race people describe struggling to develop a clear sense of identity—and some trace it to the trouble other people have in discerning their identity. In a recent Pew survey, one in five multiracial adults reported feeling pressure to claim just a single race, while nearly one in four said other people are sometimes confused about "what they are." By not fitting neatly into one category, however, researchers say the growing number of multiracial Americans may help the rest of the population develop the flexibility to see people as more than just a demographic—and to move away from race as a central marker of identity.

Hidden Figures

In 2005, Heidi Durrow was struggling to find a publisher for her novel about a girl who, like her, had a Danish mom and an African-American dad. At the time, no one seemed to think there was much of an audience for the biracial coming-of-age tale. Three years later, when Barack Obama was campaigning for president and the word biracial seemed to be everywhere, the literary landscape shifted. Durrow's book, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky , came out in 2010 and quickly became a bestseller.

How did an immense multiracial readership manage to fly under the publishing world's radar? The same way it's remained largely invisible since America was founded: Multiracial people simply weren't talking about being multiracial. "There's a long, forgotten history of mixed-race people having achieved great things, but they had to choose one race over the other. They weren't identified as multiracial," Durrow says. "Obama made a difference because he talked about it openly and in the mainstream."

When Durrow's father was growing up in the '40s and '50s, race relations were such that he felt the best bet for an African-American man was to get out of the country altogether. He joined the Air Force and requested a post in Germany. There he met Durrow's mother, a white Dane who was working on the base as a nanny. When they married, in 1965, they did so in Denmark. Interracial marriage was still illegal in much of the U.S.

Durrow grew up with a nebulous understanding of her own identity. During her childhood , her father never told her he was black; she knew his skin was brown and his facial features were different from her mother's, but that didn't carry a specific meaning for her. Neither he nor her mother talked about race. It wasn't until Durrow was 11, and her family moved to the U.S., that the significance of race in America became clear to her. "When people asked 'What are you?' I wanted to say, 'I'm American,' because that's what we said overseas," she recalls. "But what they wanted to know was: 'Are you black or are you white?'"

Unlike at the diverse Air Force base in Europe, race seemed to be the most salient part of identity in the U.S. "In Portland, I suddenly realized that the color of your skin has something to do with who you are," she says. "The color of my eyes and the color of my skin were a bigger deal than the fact that I read a lot of books and I was good at spelling."

And since the rules seemed to dictate that you could be only one race, Durrow chose the one other people were most likely to pick for her: black. "It was unsettling because I felt as if I was erasing a big part of my identity, being Danish, but people thought I should say I was black, so I did. But I was trying to figure out what that meant."

She knew that a few other kids in her class were mixed, and while she felt connected to them, she respected their silence on the subject. There were, she came to realize, compelling reasons to identify as black and only black. The legacy of America's "one-drop rule"—the idea that anyone with any black ancestry was considered black—lingered. So, too, did the trope of the "tragic mulatto," damaged and doomed to fit into neither world.

Being black, however, also meant being surrounded by a strong, supportive community. The discrimination and disenfranchisement that had driven Durrow's father out of the U.S. had brought other African Americans closer together in the struggle for justice and equality. "There's always been solidarity among blacks to advance our rights for ourselves," Durrow says. "You have to think of this in terms of a racial identity that means something to a collective, to a community."

Today, Durrow still considers herself entirely African American. But she also thinks of herself as entirely Danish. Calling herself a 50-50 mix, she says, would imply that her identity is split down the middle. "I'm not interested in mixed-race identity in terms of percentages," she explains. "I don't feel like a lesser Dane or a lesser African American. I don't want to feel like I'm a person made of pieces."

She's always longed for a sense of community with other multiracial people who share her feeling of being multiple wholes. When she sees other mixed-race families in public, she often gives them a knowing nod, but mostly gets blank stares in return. "I definitely feel a kinship with other mixed-race people, but I understand when people don't," she says. "I wonder if that's rooted in the fact that they didn't know they were allowed to be more than one." It's true that the majority of Americans with a mixed racial background—61 percent, according to a 2015 Pew survey—don't identify as multiracial at all. Half of those report identifying as the race they most closely resemble.

It's also true that racial identity can change. The majority of multiracial people polled by Pew said their identity had evolved over the years: About a third had gone from thinking of themselves as multiple races to just one, while a similar number had moved in the opposite direction, from a single race to more than one.

The New Face of Flexibility

Because she craved an opportunity to connect with other multiracial Americans, Durrow created one: the Mixed Remixed Festival. In 2014, the comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, both of whom have a black father and a white mother, were named the festival's storytellers of the year. Like Durrow's book, their Emmy-winning show, Key & Peele , had found an immense audience. They credit the show's network, Comedy Central, for recognizing them as biracial—not just black—and giving them a platform to tell that story. "The only thing they ever got annoying about was, 'More biracial stuff!' It was never, 'Make it blacker,' " Key said when the pair accepted their award.

"Comedy is something one relates to, and in discussing the mixed experience, we found a comedy that doesn't speak just to mixed people but to everybody," Peele said. "It's about being in an in-between place and being more complex than you are given credit for." As multiracial people become more visible and more vocal in mainstream America, researchers are paying more attention . And they're finding that being mixed-race carries many advantages along with its challenges.

This complexity is itself both an advantage and a disadvantage, says Sarah Gaither, a social psychologist at Duke University. Being a mix of races can lead to discrimination of a different kind than single-race minorities face, since multiracial people often endure stereotyping and rejection from multiple racial groups. "My research, and the work of others, argues that there are benefits and costs at the same time," Gaither says. "Multiracials face the highest rate of exclusion of any group. They're never black enough, white enough, Asian enough, Latino enough."

It's surprising, then, that more people in this group say being multiracial has been an advantage rather than a disadvantage—19 percent vs. 4 percent, according to a Pew survey. And Gaither's research found that those who identify as multiracial, instead of just one race, report higher self-esteem , greater well-being, and increased social engagement.

One advantage of embracing mixedness, she says, is the mental flexibility that multiracial people develop when, from a young age, they learn to switch seamlessly between their racial identities. In a 2015 study, she found that multiracial people demonstrated greater creative problem-solving skills than monoracials—but only after they'd been primed to think about their multiple identities beforehand.

These benefits aren't limited to mixed-race people, though. People of one race also have multiple social identities, and when reminded of this fact in Gaither's study, they, too, performed better on creativity tests. "We said, 'You're a student, an athlete , a friend.' When you remind them that they belong to multiple groups, they do better on these tasks," she says. "It's just that our default approach in society is to think of a person as one single identity." What gives multiracial people a creative edge may simply be that they have more practice navigating between multiple identities.

Being around multiracial people can boost creativity and agile thinking for monoracials, too, according to research by University of Hawaii psychologist Kristin Pauker. Humans are compartmentalizers by nature, and labeling others by social category is part of how we make sense of our interactions, she says.

Race is one such category. Humans have historically relied on it to decide whether to categorize someone as "in-group" or "out-group." Racially ambiguous faces, however, foil this essentialist approach. And that's a good thing, Pauker's research shows.

She found that just being exposed to a more diverse population—as often happens, say, when students move from the continental U.S. to Hawaii for college—leads to a reduction in race essentialism. It also softens the sharp edges of the in-group and out-group divide, leading to more egalitarian attitudes and an openness to people who might otherwise have been considered part of the out-group.

The students whose views evolved the most, however, were those who'd gone beyond just being exposed to diversity and had built diverse acquaintance networks as well. "We're not necessarily talking about their close friends—but people they've started to get to know," she says. What does that show us? "To change racial attitudes, it's not only being in a diverse environment and soaking things up that makes the difference: You have to formulate relationships with out-group members."

The Averageness Advantage

The cognitive benefits of being biracial may stem from navigating multiple identities, but some researchers argue that multiracial people enjoy innate benefits as well—most notably, and perhaps controversially, the tendency to be perceived as better looking on average than their monoracial peers.

In a 2005 study, Japanese and white Australians found the faces of half-Japanese, half-white people the most attractive, compared with those of either their own race or other single races. White college students in the U.K., meanwhile, were shown more than 1,200 Facebook photos of black, white, and mixed-race faces in a 2009 study and rated the mixed-race faces the most attractive. Only 40 percent of the images used in the study were of mixed-race faces, but they represented nearly three-quarters of those that made it into the top 5 percent by attractiveness rating.

More recently, a 2018 study by psychologists Elena Stepanova at the University of Southern Mississippi and Michael Strube at Washington University in St. Louis found that a group of white, black, Asian, and Latino college students rated mixed-race faces the most attractive, followed by single-race black faces.

Stepanova wanted to know which of two prevailing theories could better explain this finding: the "averageness" hypothesis, which holds that humans prefer a composite of all faces to any specific face, or the "hybrid vigor" theory, that parents from different genetic backgrounds produce healthier—and possibly more attractive—children.

In the study, Stepanova adjusted the features and skin tones of computer-generated faces to create a range of blends, and found that the highest attractiveness ratings went to those that were closest to a 50-50 blend of white and black. These faces had "almost perfectly equal Afrocentric and Eurocentric physiognomy," she says, along with a medium skin tone. Both darker- and lighter-than-average complexions were seen as less attractive.

These results seem to support the theory that we prefer average faces because they correspond most closely to the prototype we carry in our minds: the aggregated memory of what a face should look like. That would help explain why we favor a 50-50 mix of features and skin tones—especially since that doesn't always correspond to a 50-50 mix of genes, Stepanova says. "The genes that are actually expressed can vary," she says.

A 2005 study led by psychologist Craig Roberts at Scotland's University of Stirling, however, supports the hybrid vigor hypothesis—that genetic diversity makes people more attractive by virtue of their "apparent healthiness." The study didn't focus on multiracial people per se, but on people who'd inherited a different gene variant from each parent in a section of DNA that plays a key role in regulating the immune system—as opposed to two copies of the same variant. Men who were heterozygous, with two different versions of these genes, proved to be more attractive to women than those who were homozygous. And while being heterozygous doesn't necessarily mean you're multiracial, having parents of different races makes you much more likely to fall into this category, Roberts says.

Whether these good-looking heterozygotes are actually healthier or just appear so is debatable. Studies have shown that heterozygotes are indeed more resistant to infectious diseases, including Hepatitis B and HIV, and have a lower risk of developing the skin disease psoriasis—significant because healthy skin plays a clear role in attractiveness. But other researchers have been unable to find a correlation between attractiveness and actual health, which may be a testament to the power of modern medicine—especially vaccinations and antibiotics—in helping the less heterozygous among us overcome any genetic susceptibility to illness, Roberts says.

Research vs. Real World

Some researchers have extrapolated even further, suggesting that, along with possible good looks and good health, multiracial people might be genetically gifted in other ways.

Cardiff University psychologist Michael B. Lewis, who led the 2009 U.K. study on attractiveness, argues that the genetic diversity that comes with being mixed race may in fact lead to improved performance in a number of areas. As evidence, he points to the seemingly high representation of multiracial people in the top tiers of professions that require skill, such as Tiger Woods in golf, Halle Berry in acting, Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1 racing, and Barack Obama in politics .

Other researchers argue that this conclusion is an overreach. They counter that genetics doesn't make multiracial people better at golf—or even necessarily better looking. Some studies have found no difference in perceived attractiveness between mixed-race and single-race faces; others have confirmed that a preference for mixed-race faces exists, but have concluded it has more to do with prevailing cultural standards than any genetic predisposition to beauty.

A 2012 study by Jennifer Patrice Sims, a sociologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, found that in general, mixed-race people were perceived as more attractive than people of one race—but not all racial mixes, as would be the case if the cause was genetic diversity alone. (In her research, mixed black-Native Americans and black-Asians were rated the most attractive of all.) The hybrid vigor theory, Sims argues, is based on the false presumption of biologically distinct races. She points instead to evidence that attractiveness is a social construct, heavily dependent on time and place. In the U.S. right now, she says, the biracial beauty stereotype is a dominant narrative.

"Whereas in the past, particularly for women, the stereotypical northern European phenotype of blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin was considered the most attractive (think Marilyn Monroe) contemporary beauty standards now value 'tan' skin and wavy-curly hair also (think Beyonce)," she says.

But saying biracial people are inherently beautiful isn't a harmless compliment—it can contribute to exotification and objectification. For many biracial people, these reports of heightened attractiveness are an unwelcome distraction, obscuring and delegitimizing the true challenges they face. "Even though studies say we're seen as more beautiful, my lived experience negates that," says Ben O'Keefe, a political consultant who has a black father and a white mother. "We're trying to frame it as if we've become a more accepting society, but we haven't. There are still many people who wouldn't be comfortable dating outside their race."

O'Keefe's father wasn't present when he was growing up. Apart from his brother and sister, he was surrounded by white people. His mother raised him to embrace the principle of "color blindness." Since race doesn't matter, she argued, why acknowledge it at all? O'Keefe thought of himself, essentially, as white. When people asked what he was, he said Italian, which is true. He's Italian, Irish, and African American.

But other people's perceptions didn't match his self-image . A store clerk once followed him from aisle to aisle and accused him of shoplifting. While walking one night in his upper-class, predominantly white Florida community, O'Keefe was stopped by police who pulled their guns on him because residents had reported a "suspicious" black teen . When Trayvon Martin was killed nearby under similar circumstances, it triggered an awakening in O'Keefe: "I had always felt more white, but the world didn't see me that way."

The Path Forward

As much as O'Keefe wishes that milestones such as Obama's presidency signaled the dawn of a post-racial America, he encounters daily reminders that racism endures. One boy he dated in high school didn't want to bring O'Keefe home to meet his parents. "Oh, they don't know you're gay?" O'Keefe asked. "No, they do," the boy responded. "They'd just freak out if they knew I was dating a black guy."

O'Keefe has encountered discrimination in the black community as well, where others have told him, "You're not really black."

"They see me with light skin and a white family, and that has given me advantages—I recognize that. Their experience, being seen as nothing but black, influences that perception." While he understands the reasoning, it still hurts. "It's saying, 'You're not black enough to be a real black man, but you're black enough to be held up at gunpoint by police,' " he says.

These days, he doesn't get asked, "What are you?" as much as he once did, which could be a sign of progress—or simply a byproduct of moving in more "woke" circles as an adult, he says. But when he does get asked, he identifies as black. "I'm a black man who is multiracial, but it doesn't diminish my identity as a black man."

His mother, too, has abandoned her color-blind approach after coming to see it as unrealistic—and ultimately unhelpful. "We've had some really hard conversations about race," O'Keefe says. "She's embraced that it matters and we need to talk about it, and we can't fix problems if we pretend they don't exist."

The path toward a more egalitarian America will be paved with hard conversations about race, says Gaither, who is multiracial herself. Her research shows that just being around biracial people makes white people less likely to endorse a color-blind ideology—and that color blindness, although well-intentioned, is ultimately harmful to race relations.

In a series of studies published in 2018, Gaither found that the more contact white people had with biracial people, the less they considered themselves color-blind, and the more comfortable they were discussing issues around race that they would otherwise have avoided. This suggests that a growing multiracial population will help shift racial attitudes. But it doesn't mean the transition will be easy.

"If you're in a primarily white environment and multiracial populations are growing, you may find that threatening and look for ways to reaffirm your place in the hierarchy," says the University of Hawaii's Pauker. "As minority populations grow, that's going to be a hard adjustment on both sides."

While there's no population threshold that, once reached, will signal the end of racism in America, being around more multiracial people can at least nudge monoracials to start thinking and talking more about what race really means.

"We are not the solution to race relations, but we cause people to rethink what race may or may not mean to them, which I hope will lead to more open and honest discussions," says Gaither. "The good news is that our attitudes and identities are malleable. Exposing people to those who are different is the best way to promote inclusion—and the side effect is that we can benefit cognitively as well. If we start acknowledging that we all have multiple identities, we can all be more flexible and creative."

The Multiethnic Elite

People of mixed race are well represented at the top of many fields

Submit your response to this story to [email protected] . If you would like us to consider your letter for publication, please include your name, city, and state. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Pick up a copy of Psychology Today on newsstands now or subscribe to read the the rest of the latest issue.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Teletherapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

The GW Hatchet

Are you human? Yes!

Email address:

Essay: The journey to embracing my mixed ethnicity

Sarah Abdelkahlek, a junior majoring in psychology, is a Hatchet opinions writer.

As a child, I spent a lot of time in my mother’s hometown about 100 miles outside of Pittsburgh. This small, charming dot on the map has a population that is 97 percent white. Needless to say, I stood out with my tan skin, dark eyes and curls large enough to host all 7,597 people who live there. My unusual features sometimes elicited questioning looks, pointed fingers and snide remarks.

A few weeks after my fifth birthday, my mother and I stood in line at her favorite childhood restaurant. The bell on the entrance door dinged and an older couple entered. They took one look at me and my fair-skinned, hazel-eyed, blonde mother and commended her for adopting me. At the time, I was too young to understand how offensive this comment actually was but old enough to sense that it made my mother uneasy. It was clear that the couple was not ill-intentioned, but it highlighted the ignorance that surrounds my ethnic ambiguity.

If I had a penny for every time someone has asked me “What are you?,” I could likely pay the full tuitions of every student in my class at GW. From strangers on the street to job interviewers to professors, the question does not seem off limits to anyone. I am not personally offended by the question, but it becomes a bit cumbersome to answer over and over again.

My initial response is always the same: “I am human.” Then I usually elaborate on my ethnicity. As easy as answering the question of “what I am” seems, it used to be hard for me. I hopelessly longed to blend in without being singled out. Now, however, I am proud to share that I am Egyptian American. But getting to this point was no easy feat: I had to reconcile the two very different sides of my family.

My parents, a small-town Pennsylvanian and an Egyptian immigrant, met at a restaurant in Pittsburgh in the early 1990’s. My father, eager to contribute to his new country, quickly joined the Marine Corps. My father proposed to my mother before leaving for boot camp, and they soon tied the knot, despite reluctance from both of their families. My mother’s family was surprised, as they thought she would end up with someone from her town, as many people did. They knew very little about my father and his ethnic background but eventually accepted him. My father’s family — almost 6,000 miles away in Egypt — did not get to meet my mother before she shared their last name. With time, they, too, came to love her as one of their own. Two years later, I was born. My parents named me Sarah — a name that has both Western and Arab roots.

My first language is English, but I have picked up some Arabic over the years, thanks to my paternal grandmother’s favorite Arabic-dubbed Turkish soap operas. She taught me the importance of serving guests with the finest tea and biscuits, burning bukhoor to freshen the house and making enough baklava to cover the thousands of miles between here and Egypt. She, along with the rest of my eccentric Egyptian family, urged me to take pride in my heritage. This, however, proved to be a lot easier said than done in a post-9/11 world.

In a time when anyone with dark features and a complicated, Arabic-sounding last name was labeled a “terrorist” or “terrorist sympathizer,” it seemed imperative to distance myself from some parts of my culture. For a long time, I desperately clung to things that made me “white.” I thought that packing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch instead of leftover koshary would make me more normal. I thought that spending hours straightening my unruly hair would make me more relatable. I thought that associating more with my mother’s white side of the family would make me more “American.” Maintaining this facade was exhausting, and naturally, I began to lose sense of who I truly was.

It was not until my junior year of high school when I realized the error of my ways. I was compiling pictures for a class project and stumbled upon old photos of our family trip to Egypt in 2008. In that moment, I was overcome by nostalgia, unhappiness and regret — mostly regret, though. How could I repress such an important part of my identity? Why would I acknowledge only one culture when I am lucky enough to have two?

Starting college was a pivotal moment in my journey to explore my mixed identity. I was surrounded by a diverse crowd: 3.5 percent of my fellow undergraduate students identify as multiple races. I recently learned that there is even a student organization at GW for those who “fill out more than one box on forms asking for race/ethnicity.” With so much diversity around me, I no longer feel like an outsider.

For instance, I met one of my best friends, who is half-German and half-Lebanese, in a religion course my freshman year. We immediately bonded over the struggle of having language barriers in the house and feeling divided on religious holidays. We also discussed how difficult it can be to form an identity when we feel we don’t fully fit because we’re only “half” or, conversely, too much of one and not the other.

Although staying true to both distinct halves of who I am has not always been effortless, I would not want it any other way. I embrace the fact that I can immerse myself in two cultures. I look forward to one day telling my future curly-haired kids my story, but in the meantime, you can catch me walking around campus shamelessly blasting Amr Diab or Justin Timberlake, with a Tasty Kabob gyro or Chick-fil-A sandwich in hand.

Want to publish a personal essay? Submit your idea.

• Social Justice
• Environment
• Health & Happiness
• Get YES! Emails
• Teacher Resources

• Give A Gift Subscription

Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.

Shapeshifting: Discovering the “We” in Mixed-Race Experiences

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve been longing for your whole life until you experience it. As a mixed-race woman, I never knew how much it would mean for me to finally sit in a room full of other multiracial women until, at age 45, I taught a creative writing class called  Shapeshifting: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience . I was nervous because I’d never attended something like this myself. And yet, sometimes when it becomes clear that you need something that doesn’t already exist, you have to create it yourself.

I once considered myself to be a shy person, afraid to speak in public. However, my close friends knew me differently, and at my core I knew myself differently too. While I remained quiet in high school, college, and beyond, in intimate spaces I could be bold and funny. When I was younger, I used to think that my insecurities came from my youth or my gender. But the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve also come to question how much of my conditioning— to feel quiet, silent, and invisible—has come from my mixed-race heritage?

I am an Asian American woman. I am also mixed race—my father is White and my mother is Chinese. And I have many questions. 

What does it feel like to grow up and never see reflections of yourself or your family in the shows you watch or the books you read, or to rarely see yourself in positions of power? 

For mixed-race people, especially those of us who have one White parent, the answers to questions of identity can be confusing to sort out.

What does it feel like to sense you don’t exist in the outside world, or to never have been given a language—a book of history, a collection of stories, the perspective of an elder—to help name the lineage you are a part of, who you are in relationship to America’s history of racism, or who you are within the rules about who is Black or Asian or Native American or Latinx or White? 

How much blood does one need to be able to claim an identity? One half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth, one drop?

Learning more about the history of our nation’s formation has taught me that the answers to questions of identity depends on how much White people have wanted to leverage their control over others’ bodies or lands, and how beneficial it was to claim you as their own. Each racial and ethnic community has a unique relationship to history’s shaping of mixed-race identities, and our absorption into or exclusion from Whiteness depends on the shifting of the White supremacy culture’s needs. Asian Americans, for example, were held up as “model minorities” to prove America’s great myth of meritocracy and used as a wedge against Black people: ‘see, anyone can succeed here if they just try.’ But we have also been expelled from this country, put in concentration camps, perpetually seen as foreign, or dangerous, and most recently, blamed for the spread of a deadly virus.

For mixed-race people, especially those of us who have one White parent, the answers to questions of identity can be confusing to sort out. Many of us who grew up in majority-White communities, have unconsciously been taught to aspire to Whiteness. Conversely, others have been encouraged to deny all ties to Whiteness—or we choose to lean in that direction ourselves once we realize how much we’ve been conditioned to see ourselves as inferior or lacking by the standards of White supremacy culture. But whether we are denying our “color” or denying our “Whiteness,” these false binaries can in turn lead us to internalize the notion that part of us is damaged, inferior, or too shameful to be spoken about. They can make us feel like we have to be shapeshifters to be accepted or belong.

I grew up attending an integrated—yet also highly segregated—high school in Seattle, during the era of  Rodney King , and in an environment that taught me to see conversations around race through the binary of Black and White. As a mixed-race Asian girl, I had already learned by then to assimilate and identify with my White peers. It wasn’t until I started college that I realized how much I needed to reclaim my mother tongue of Chinese, a language I grew up speaking with my mother and grandmother as a young child but grew distanced from as an adult. Leaving college, then traveling and living in China for more than three years helped me to reclaim that part of me—as much as it also taught me that the Chinese saw me as a Westerner, as well as how American I truly was. 

Most mixed-race people never know what it means to be part of a community where we can feel relaxed or have a sense of belonging when it comes to race.

Back in the U.S., I continued to interrogate my racial identity, but now, once again through an American lens. Here, I am seen by most people as Asian. Here, the terms of how many saw me had changed again—my “otherness” set up against Whiteness, as opposed to against “Chineseness.” Here, it became increasingly crucial for me to drill deeper into my own silence and complicity when it comes to anti-Blackness, implicit bias, and inherited wealth. Attending racial equity trainings, I grew familiar with the practice of dividing the room into two caucusing groups—one for people of color, and one for White people. 

By now, I clearly knew I was not White, but I still did not feel comfortable taking up space discussing my identity issues or light-skinned privilege in a group dedicated to people of color. And yet, I also knew that I too had experienced racial pain. I realized that to overcome my own silence around others’ oppression, I needed to give voice to mine too. 

Ever since college, I have written privately about my racial in-betweenness, but after returning from China and eventually attending trainings, I developed more of a contextual lens; I learned to see where my struggles aligned with other people of color, and where they diverged. Recently, as a creative writing teacher, I have begun to offer spaces for other mixed-race folks to write about their experiences. I needed to express things privately  and  I needed share in community, because I realized that shame can only live in silence. Once we voice something in a safe space and we feel witnessed and heard, shame can start to dissipate. 

Most mixed-race people never know what it means to be part of a community where we can feel relaxed or have a sense of belonging when it comes to race. Even in our own families, we often look different from our parents or relatives. We perch at the edge of other communities who may tentatively welcome us, but deep down we suspect we don’t fully belong. We have grown up with so many reminders of how our experiences mark us as outsiders, that we have started to distrust ourselves too. 

I’m here to tell you, after 25 years of writing and interrogating my own roots and identity, that it doesn’t have to be this way. But where do we begin, especially if we barely know any other mixed-race people? 

We can start by reading others’ stories. There aren’t enough of them out there, but that is changing. And we can also begin, at any stage of life, to write our own accounts. In this way, we can begin to name how our experiences are similar to others, for example, how certain traits that we have internalized as our own private maladies may actually stem from larger systemic structures. Furthermore, we can name where our experiences diverge, where our intersectional identities and relative privileges result in our unique stories. We can join affinity groups online, we can find therapists who mirror our origins, we can open up about our deepest vulnerabilities and fears. We can learn to recognize how sometimes shapeshifting harms us, and other times it opens pathways to new conversations. We can begin, one small step at a time, to claim our voice and story as important, and an essential part of contributing to the conversation as we name the dual myth and reality of race. 

Inspiration in Your Inbox

Sign up to receive email updates from YES!

Enough Finger-Pointing: That Kid in the MAGA Hat Is My Kid! (He’s Yours, Too)

A New Supreme Court Nominee Before the Election May Spark a Crisis of Legitimacy

How comfort food is getting me through these rough post-election days.

Inhabiting Worlds Where Black Lives Really Matter

Most popular.

How “Whitey on the Moon” Perfectly Captures Bezos’ Space Joy Ride

Inspiration in your inbox..

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The mixed-race experience: 'There are times I feel like the odd one out'

A series of portraits of mixed-race people from around the world has cast new light on how we see ourselves

L ast year the photographer Tenee Attoh began taking portraits of multiracial friends and acquaintances against a mottled black background at the Bussey Building in Peckham, southeast London. Attoh is half-Dutch on her mother’s side, half-Ghanaian on her father’s, and identifies as mixed-race. Born in the UK, she spent most of the first 23 years of her life in Accra and Amsterdam, shuttling between cities and cultures, an experience she found enlightening but problematic. “On the one hand it allows you to develop a different understanding of the world,” she says of her duality. “But there’s still a lot of ignorance in society. People perceive you as either black or white, and you’re not – you’re mixed.”

Working in London, Attoh heard similar stories from other mixed-race people, and soon she began publishing her images online (at mixedracefaces.com and on Instagram) alongside small texts that allowed her subjects to share personal thoughts on identity, race and self, something they couldn’t do elsewhere. Following the death of her mother, to whom the series is dedicated, the project helped Attoh dissect her own multiracial experience – what it means to be connected to two worlds at once, and how society perceives that condition – but it has also sparked an open forum on diversity. “It’s not a topic people usually talk about,” Attoh says. “So the website has become a platform for people with mixed heritage. It’s given a lot of them a sense of belonging.”

When she was starting out, friends and family corralled subjects for Attoh to shoot. (She is indebted to her family, she says, for the work they’ve contributed for free: the space in which the portraits are taken is co-run by her son; the 90 or so hour-long interviews were transcribed by her daughter-in-law, often late at night.) Now subjects, keen to share their personal histories, approach Attoh directly, and she notices themes reoccurring. Many subjects celebrate the benefit of being able to flit between cultures while embracing both. Others talk of the strain inherent in not being of one place – of being from neither here nor there, tugged between one identity and another. Some find it easy, others less so.

Attoh has now taken more than 90 images, a selection of which are published here. Those photographed represent great portions of the world – Japan, Jamaica, Malaysia, Sweden, Iran, China, South Africa – but also provide a portrait of contemporary Britain. In the 2011 census 1.25 million people identified as mixed race, making it the fastest-growing ethnic group in the UK. “A mixed-race girl just married a prince!” says Attoh. But discrimination persists. “It’s 2018, and mixed-race people are still asked the question, ‘Where are you really from?’”

Later this year Attoh will organise an exhibition of the photos she’s made so far. In the meantime she’ll turn her lens on subjects in Holland, to examine differences in the mixed-race experience. But mostly her project is meant to raise public awareness. “I’m hoping it will become a platform for wider discussion,” Attoh says. “To help people understand these different points of view, these different experiences.”

Liz Loginova, North Korean/Russian

I grew up in Moscow until I was about nine and then we moved to the UK. I feel Russian, really. I speak Russian at home. Culturally I don’t have any real Korean connections; if anything, I feel more British than North Korean. When I was younger I didn’t want to be Asian at all; I was embarrassed by it. It doesn’t bother me now, but then I alternated between thinking it was something interesting about myself and hating the fact that I looked different. I really wanted to have lighter hair.

Fintan O’Haire, Indian Jamaican/Irish

I’m Irish on my dad’s side, mixed Jamaican and Indian on my mum’s. There are times I feel like the odd one out, especially at family functions. You’ll see a sea of white faces, and then there’s me and my brother. It can be isolating; there aren’t many people I can relate to. In my adult years I’ve learned to appreciate where I come from. I can’t tell people I’m one race because I’d be disrespecting the other. I try to maintain the balance.

Marie Creasey, Colombian/British

I was born and raised in San Francisco. My mother is Colombian and my dad is mixed Scottish and English. They met on a blind date; 14 days later they were married. When I was little I was very dark, but when I turned seven I became very fair. There was an awkward time when people thought my mum was my nanny. Because I was so light-skinned I would embrace being English rather than being Colombian. My son is a blond-haired, blue-eyed child, but I want him to know he is mixed Colombian.

Robert Sae-Heng, Mexican/Thai

I was born in London but lived in Mexico until I was eight because of my disability – I was born deaf. I went to live with my grandmother in a small village. We had a pet donkey called Jesús. We also had chickens, pigs, goats, you name it. It was a great childhood. But in school in Mexico, I was always seen as being different. In Mexico people call each other by nicknames. My family’s nickname was ‘Japonicitos’ – Japanese. In Mexico they’d never really seen an Oriental person before, apart from what they’d seen on TV, on Dragon Ball Z.

Jade Duncan-Knight, British Irish/Indian Jamaican

I’ve spent my whole life in England so I’ve always identified as British. My mother is half-Jamaican and half-Indian; my dad is half-English and half-Irish. I appreciated visiting people on both sides of the family; each time I could learn and experience different and unique things about the cultures I was connected to: food, music, traditions, stories. It was interesting to hear from those who spoke patois, while others spoke with London accents. Though sometimes the middle ground felt like a lonely place.

Raymond Antrobus, British/Jamaican

I’m a teacher, I spend a lot of time with younger people, and I’m hearing so many younger mixed-race people interrogating what they call their ‘privilege theory’. What are their privileges as a light-skinned person? How does their status relate to that of their darker-skinned friends, or people who look more African or more European? It’s a hell of a thing to navigate, and I think there’s a pressure on younger people to understand it. But your identity can be about many things. It doesn’t have to be just about race. It could be about being a parent, a cyclist, a musician.

Paksie Vernon, British/Lesotho

Dad and Mum met in Lesotho. Dad worked for NGOs. I was born in Wales, but I didn’t live in the UK until I was 13. When we were young we lived in many countries: Ghana, Uganda, Mali, Kenya. I loved the food in Ghana. Even for a mixed-race person I’m quite fair, so until I was 13 I thought of myself as white (every African country has a word for ‘white person’.) When I came to the UK I was told I was black. It highlighted a lot about race: how so much of your identity is what other people put on you.

Nina Camara, Guinean/Slovak

I was born and brought up in a small town in Slovakia. It’s not mixed at all: around 95% white. Race wasn’t really an issue, but I did come across people who would shout at me on the street, things like ‘black girl’, which I found very unpleasant. I became guarded. I came to the UK because I wanted to experience something different, to be treated like a normal human being. That’s what I like about London: it’s so diverse, you don’t get labelled. The culture I grew up in doesn’t really reflect who I am. When someone thinks of Slovaks, they don’t picture faces like mine.

Dean Atta, Greek Cypriot/Jamaican

My mum’s family are from Cyprus. My dad’s family are Jamaican, with African heritage. But I grew up in northwest London. When I was the president of the African Caribbean Society at university, one of my friends who ran the society with me told me I wasn’t really black because I had a white mum. I think from that point onwards I’ve always referred to myself as black – very intentionally. I stand in solidarity with all black people. I don’t think being mixed makes me any less black. Whiteness is set up to exclude all those who are not white.

• Photography
• The Observer

Most viewed

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Code Switch

• School Colors
• Perspectives

The Code Switch Podcast

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

'Racial Impostor Syndrome': Here Are Your Stories

Leah Donnella

"Racial impostor syndrome" is definitely a thing for many people. We hear from biracial and multi-ethnic listeners who connect with feeling "fake" or inauthentic in some part of their racial or ethnic heritage. Kristen Uroda for NPR hide caption

"Racial impostor syndrome" is definitely a thing for many people. We hear from biracial and multi-ethnic listeners who connect with feeling "fake" or inauthentic in some part of their racial or ethnic heritage.

It's tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a "racial impostor." For one Code Switch follower, it's the feeling she gets from whipping out "broken but strangely colloquial Arabic" in front of other Middle Easterners.

For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it's being treated like "just another tourist" when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, "Is this allowed?"

A Festival For Mixed-Race Storytellers — And Everyone Else, Too

In this week's podcast, we go deep into what we're calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angeles that's, in some ways, all about this.

Here's how we got started down this track. A couple months ago, listener Kristina Ogilvie wrote in to tell us that "living at the intersection of different identities and cultures" was like "stumbling around in a forest in the dark."

She asked, "Do you hear from other listeners who feel like fakes?"

Good question. So we took it to our audience, and what we heard back was a resounding "yes."

We got 127 emails from people who are stumbling through that dark, racially ambiguous forest. (And yes, we read every single one.)

Here are excerpts drawn from a few of the many letters that made us laugh, cry and argue — and that guided this week's episode.

Let's start with Angie Yingst of Pennsylvania:

"My mother is a Panamanian immigrant and my father is a white guy from Pennsylvania. I've always felt liminal, like I drift between race and culture. When I was young (20s) and living in the city, I would get asked multiple times a day where I was from, where my people were from, because Allentown, Pennsylvania, clearly wasn't the answer they were looking for ... It always felt like the undercurrent of that question was, 'You aren't white, but you aren't black. What are you?' "But truthfully, I don't feel like I fit with Latinas either. My Spanish is atrocious and I grew up in rural PA. Even my cousin said a few weeks ago, 'Well, you aren't really Spanish, because your dad is white.' Which gutted me, truly. I identify as Latina. I identify with my mother's culture and country as well as American culture. In shops, I'm treated like every other Latina, followed around, then ignored at the counter. I married a white guy and had children who are blonde and blue eyed, and I'm frequently asked if I'm the nanny or babysitter. And white acquaintances often say, 'You are white. You act white.' And I saltily retort, 'Why? Because I'm not doing your lawn, or taking care of your kids? You need to broaden your idea of what Latina means.' "

Jen Boggs of Hawaii says she often feels like a racial impostor, but isn't quite sure which race she's faking:

"I was born in the Philippines and moved to Hawaii when I was three. ... I grew up thinking that I was half-Filipina and half-white, under the impression that my mom's first husband was my biological father. I embraced this 'hapa-haole' identity (as they say in Hawaii), and loved my ethnic ambiguity. My mom wanted me to speak perfect English, so never spoke anything but to me. After she divorced her first husband and re-married my stepdad from Michigan, my whiteness became cemented. "Except. As it turns out, my biological father was a Filipino man whom I've never met. I didn't find out until I tried to apply for a passport in my late twenties and the truth came out. So, at age 28 I learned that I was not half white but all Filipina. ... "This new knowledge was a huge blow to my identity and, admittedly, to my self esteem. 'But I'm white,' I remember thinking. 'I'm so so white.' After much therapy, I'm happy and comfortable in my brown skin, though I'm still working out how others perceive me as this Other, Asian person." Code Switch All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?

Indigo Goodson's mom is Jamaican and her dad is African-American. She wrote about the way people's perceptions of her change based on where she lives:

"Culturally we grew up as Jamaican as two California-born black American children could have in the Bay Area. ... We ate mostly Jamaican food (prepared by both our mother and father), our Jamaican family lived with us growing up, and it was my mother that told us Anansi stories and other tales or sayings popular in Jamaica. " ... Both my parents are black, so no one ever asked 'What are you?' ... But then when folks would meet my mum they would say things like, 'Oh I thought you were black!' or 'You do look Jamaican!' And I would tell people I'm still black and clearly Jamaicans look like black Americans because we are both the descendants of enslaved West Africans. Now that I live in New York City, where if you're black people assume you are first generation Caribbean, I often have to remind people that my dad is black American and so am I."

Helen Seely is originally from California. She told us what it's like for her to interact with different groups as a light-skinned biracial woman:

"White people like to believe I'm Caucasian like them; I think it makes their life less complicated. But I don't identify as 100% white, so there always comes a time in the conversation or relationship where I need to 'out' myself and tell them that I'm biracial. "It's a vulnerable experience, but it becomes even harder when I'm with black Americans. It may sound strange — and there are so many layers to this that are hard to unpack — but I think what it comes down to is: they have more of a claim to 'blackness' than I ever will and therefore have the power to tell me I don't belong, I'm not enough, that I should stay on the white side of the identity line. "You know that question we always get asked? 'What are you?' Well, I still don't know. I've never had an answer that I can say with confidence; I still don't know what I'm allowed to claim."

Natalia Romero echoes some of those feelings. Her family left Colombia for the U.S. when she was 9 years old, and she says that while she doesn't consider herself white, she gets treated like she's white all the time:

"My mother doesn't speak English and so when I am home all we speak is Spanish and act like a bunch of rowdy, tight knit Colombians ... I grew up experiencing what many poor young immigrants face — bad schools, hunger, poverty, a lack of resources — but eventually managed to pay my way through college and work now as a musician and teacher, often very white communities. " ... When people talk about the current political climate, they speak to me as if I were white, not someone who is terrified of the hatred of Latinx and Hispanic people, someone who walks around with my green card in my wallet, knowing that until I am a citizen (which I morally have a huge problem with) I am not safe. I exist and inhabit these white spaces, but my experience is not white. My experiences comes from being the sole English speaker in my house at age 9 and having to speak for my parents at the bank, at school, in apartments. My experience is from pretending my youngest sister wasn't part of our family because the apartment complex only allowed 4 people to a 1 bedroom apartment and we couldn't afford a 2 bedroom one. I come from a place where people speak poorly of Latinx people around me not realizing I am one ... "

Everyone's story is different, and as is discussed on the podcast, we're still learning how to talk about identities that fall outside of our traditional understandings of race in the United States. Luckily, for those who are confused, you're in good company.

A Prescription For "Racial Imposter Syndrome"

• racial impostor
• light skinned

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Multiracial, Mixed-Race, and Biracial Identities

Introduction, multiracial identity development.

• The Role of Phenotype and Social Classification in Multiracial Identity
• Demography of Multiraciality
• Shifting Multiraciality
• Multiraciality outside the Black-White Binary
• Non-US and Global Multiraciality
• Youth and Family Dynamics
• Multiraciality and Politics: The Politics of Multiraciality
• Multiracial Intersectionalities
• Multiraciality in Culture
• The Interactive Effects of Multiraciality and Racism
• Critical Mixed-Race Studies

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• African Americans
• Asian Americans
• Latino/Latina Studies

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Consumer Credit and Debt
• Global Inequalities
• LGBTQ+ Spaces
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Multiracial, Mixed-Race, and Biracial Identities by David L. Brunsma , hephzibah v. strmic-pawl LAST MODIFIED: 22 April 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0249

Scholarship designed to ask questions about the meanings of, identities of, and experiences of the offspring of interracial unions has been around for almost a century but has only seriously and significantly developed since the 1990s. From the early days of theorizing such experience from the counselor’s chair, psychological models planted early seeds, yet the ground of multiracial experience was one fundamentally wrapped up with institutions, social structures, political movements, histories and stories, racialization and microaggressions, family and peer dynamics, and other important social, cultural, economic, historical, collective, and political realities. Multiracial scholarship developed early on from an interest in understanding how the offspring of interracial unions, whether white/black, black/Asian, Latinx/white, and so on, develop understandings of themselves, as well as how others influence that understanding; thus, identity was a crucial starting point. Appearances, phenotype, and the sociocultural models of racial classification and the role that these play in the complex process of multiracial identity formation, development, maintenance, and change have become staple research questions. The racial demographics of race and multiraciality, along with the politics of census categorization and the tracing of such demographic and policy shifts over time, have provided more-macro contexts that have played into the ways we both study and, therefore, understand multiraciality. In the 2010s, scholars really began to move outside the black-white binary, more intersectionally and transdisciplinarily, and across national and historical contexts to develop an even more nuanced and complex theoretical and empirical understanding of multiraciality. From early-21st-century developments in critical mixed-race theory to the political importance of multiraciality in social movements, and from the role of multiraciality in popular culture and marketing to the potential and pitfalls of multiraciality and its politics dismantling ideas of race, realities of racism, and the pursuit of racial and social justice, scholarship on multiraciality has given us deeply important understandings.

The core intellectual agenda in the scholarly study of multiraciality from the beginnings centered on multiracial identity—how it forms and develops, and how it is maintained and changed. Identity has always been at the heart of psychological and sociological research on multiraciality. The early work of Poston ( Poston 1990 ) raised key early questions from the counselor’s chair and set a research agenda regarding multiracial psycho-social navigation. Two edited collections, Root 1992 and Root 1996 , brought together the best and cutting-edge scholars whose work through the 1980s and 1990s added important social, cultural, political, temporal, and demographic dimensions to this central intellectual agenda. Scholars would begin creating empirically grounded models and taxonomies of multiracial identity that would be used by scholars in the first two decades of the 21st century, including key models in Rockquemore 1998 , Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002 , Rockquemore and Brunsma 2004–2008 , and Khanna 2011 . Others (such as Renn 2012 ) would eventually engage more fully with intersectional identity in institutional contexts, and Brunsma 2006 , an edited volume titled Mixed Messages , would bring together the second generation of scholars on multiracial identity whose work was in building theory, culminating in a theoretical agenda set in Rockquemore, et al. 2009 .

Brunsma, D. L., ed. 2006. Mixed messages: Multiracial identities in the “color-blind” era . Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

An interdisciplinary collection of original, critical scholarship on multiraciality. This volume was the first to bring together the burgeoning social-scientific scholarship conducted during the lead-up to the 2000 census change. These twenty chapters (plus a critical introduction) covered the broad areas of the sociocultural politics of (multi)racial identity, critical essays on the multiracial movement, early sociological work on racial socialization in interracial families, and continuing scholarship on racial-identity formation in multiracial individuals.

Khanna, N. 2011. Biracial in America: Forming and performing racial identity . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Using in-depth interviews, Khanna studies the processes shaping black-white (multi)racial identity and how biracials perform their race. Using a social-psychological approach, this book is particularly recognized for its analysis of biracials’ reflected appraisals, which is how biracials negotiate their identity in relationship to how they think others perceive them. Khanna finds that the one-drop rule still has a large influence in black-white biracials’ feeling that they are black.

Poston, W. S. C. 1990. The biracial identity development model: A needed addition. Journal of Counseling & Development 69.2: 152–155.

An early theoretical intervention from counseling psychology into the scholarship and theoretical assumptions of multiracial (biracial) identity development. The author attends to extant theories of racial-identity development and provides crucial critiques of their applicability to multiracial identity development. This article took us away from deficit/tragic models of identity development to more positive/agentic ones. Implications for both research and counseling are offered—many of which have been followed to this day.

Renn, K. A. 2012. Mixed race students in college: The ecology of race, identity, and community on campus . Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

A widely read study of multiracial identity within the context of higher education. Combining ethnography and interviews of fifty-six multiracial students at six colleges, this study focused on the role of context, peer cultures, and public/private negotiations of multiracial identity. Four identity themes—monoracial, multiple monoracial, extraracial, and situational—lead to further refinement of her influential developmental ecological framework for studying multiraciality in institutional context. Implications for policy and practice in higher education are discussed.

Rockquemore, K. A. 1998. Between black and white exploring the “biracial” experience. Race and Society 1.2: 197–212.

Considered one of the first critical, sociological engagements with multiracial identity formations and their social-structural locations. Using in-depth interviews with young adult black/white multiracials, the author develops the first sociological typology of multiracial identity where multiracials craft meaningful “Border” (biracial), “Protean” (contextually shifting), “Transcendent” (no racial identifiers), or “Traditional” (white or black), identities. The roles of appearance and social-structural location and its effects on these identity options are theorized here as well.

Rockquemore, K. A., and D. L. Brunsma. 2002. Socially embedded identities: Theories, typologies, and processes of racial identity among black/white biracials. Sociological Quarterly 43.3: 335–356.

This study extends the typology of black/white multiracial identities in Rockquemore 1998 . Using the typology to summarize extant empirical literature, this study tests hypotheses predicting each identity type, using a survey sample of 177 black/white multiracials. Results indicate the importance of racial composition of social networks, appearance, experiences of discrimination (from whites and blacks), and feelings of closeness (to whites or blacks). The idea of identity validation and invalidation is developed in this article.

Rockquemore, K. A., and D. L. Brunsma. 2004–2008. Beyond black: Biracial identity in America . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

A key book in the sociological scholarship on multiracial identity. Each edition of the book provides a historical overview of racial identity in the United States, summarizes and engages with the extant literature on multiracial identity, and critically plots the racial-political contours of the multiracial movement and the census. This work provides empirical evidence of the social structure of multiracial identity, theorizes the role of appearance in multiracial identities, and provides thoughts on future directions.

Rockquemore, K. A., D. L. Brunsma, and D. J. Delgado. 2009. Racing to theory or retheorizing race? Understanding the struggle to build a multiracial identity theory. Journal of Social Issues 65.1: 13–34.

Taking stock of some twenty years of scholarship on multiraciality in order to build theory, this piece considers researchers’ conceptualization of and assumptions underlying racial-identity development among mixed-race people, the challenges to current efforts at understanding the identity-category-identification matrix, and the implications of new identities emerging within the multiracial population. It ends by warning about multiraciality’s potential for reproducing of dominant ideologies, and that scholars should reckon with their own blinders.

Root, M. P. P., ed. 1992. Racially mixed people in America . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

A foundational book in the study of mixed-race communities, and one of the earliest edited volumes that take a late-20th-century evaluation of multiracialism. Issues addressed in this book include experiences of multiracials, factors affecting multiracial identity development, changing demographics, and methods used to study multiracialism.

Root, M. P. P., ed. 1996. The multiracial experience: Racial borders as the new frontier . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

The second foundational volume edited by pioneering multiracial scholar Maria P. Root, which continues to investigate the factors affecting multiracial identity. This volume examines difficult questions in areas such as adoption, border crossing, intersections with gender and sexuality, and the relationships among multiracial identity, racialization, and racism. This book also features Root’s famous chapter “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.”

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Sociology »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Actor-Network Theory
• Adolescence
• African Societies
• Agent-Based Modeling
• Analysis, Spatial
• Analysis, World-Systems
• Anomie and Strain Theory
• Arab Spring, Mobilization, and Contentious Politics in the...
• Assimilation
• Authority and Work
• Bell, Daniel
• Biosociology
• Bourdieu, Pierre
• Catholicism
• Causal Inference
• Chicago School of Sociology
• Chinese Cultural Revolution
• Chinese Society
• Citizenship
• Civil Rights
• Civil Society
• Cognitive Sociology
• Cohort Analysis
• Collective Efficacy
• Collective Memory
• Comparative Historical Sociology
• Comte, Auguste
• Conflict Theory
• Conservatism
• Consumer Culture
• Consumption
• Contemporary Family Issues
• Contingent Work
• Conversation Analysis
• Corrections
• Cosmopolitanism
• Crime, Cities and
• Cultural Capital
• Cultural Classification and Codes
• Cultural Economy
• Cultural Omnivorousness
• Cultural Production and Circulation
• Culture and Networks
• Culture, Sociology of
• Development
• Discrimination
• Doing Gender
• Du Bois, W.E.B.
• Durkheim, Émile
• Economic Institutions and Institutional Change
• Economic Sociology
• Education and Health
• Education Policy in the United States
• Educational Policy and Race
• Empires and Colonialism
• Entrepreneurship
• Environmental Sociology
• Epistemology
• Ethnic Enclaves
• Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
• Exchange Theory
• Families, Postmodern
• Family Policies
• Feminist Theory
• Field, Bourdieu's Concept of
• Forced Migration
• Foucault, Michel
• Frankfurt School
• Gender and Bodies
• Gender and Crime
• Gender and Education
• Gender and Health
• Gender and Incarceration
• Gender and Professions
• Gender and Social Movements
• Gender and Work
• Gender Pay Gap
• Gender, Sexuality, and Migration
• Gender Stratification
• Gender, Welfare Policy and
• Gendered Sexuality
• Gentrification
• Gerontology
• Globalization and Labor
• Goffman, Erving
• Historic Preservation
• Human Trafficking
• Immigration
• Indian Society, Contemporary
• Institutions
• Intellectuals
• Intersectionalities
• Interview Methodology
• Job Quality
• Knowledge, Critical Sociology of
• Labor Markets
• Law and Society
• Law, Sociology of
• LGBT Parenting and Family Formation
• LGBT Social Movements
• Life Course
• Lipset, S.M.
• Markets, Conventions and Categories in
• Marriage and Divorce
• Marxist Sociology
• Masculinity
• Mass Incarceration in the United States and its Collateral...
• Material Culture
• Mathematical Sociology
• Medical Sociology
• Mental Illness
• Methodological Individualism
• Middle Classes
• Military Sociology
• Money and Credit
• Multiculturalism
• Multilevel Models
• Multiracial, Mixed-Race, and Biracial Identities
• Nationalism
• Non-normative Sexuality Studies
• Occupations and Professions
• Organizations
• Panel Studies
• Parsons, Talcott
• Political Culture
• Political Economy
• Political Sociology
• Popular Culture
• Proletariat (Working Class)
• Protestantism
• Public Opinion
• Public Space
• Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)
• Race and Sexuality
• Race and Violence
• Race and Youth
• Race in Global Perspective
• Race, Organizations, and Movements
• Rational Choice
• Relationships
• Religion and the Public Sphere
• Residential Segregation
• Revolutions
• Role Theory
• Rural Sociology
• Scientific Networks
• Secularization
• Sequence Analysis
• Sex versus Gender
• Sexual Identity
• Sexualities
• Sexuality Across the Life Course
• Simmel, Georg
• Single Parents in Context
• Small Cities
• Social Capital
• Social Change
• Social Closure
• Social Construction of Crime
• Social Control
• Social Darwinism
• Social Disorganization Theory
• Social Epidemiology
• Social History
• Social Indicators
• Social Mobility
• Social Movements
• Social Network Analysis
• Social Networks
• Social Policy
• Social Problems
• Social Psychology
• Social Stratification
• Social Theory
• Socialization, Sociological Perspectives on
• Sociolinguistics
• Sociological Approaches to Character
• Sociological Research on the Chinese Society
• Sociological Research, Qualitative Methods in
• Sociological Research, Quantitative Methods in
• Sociology, History of
• Sociology of Manners
• Sociology of Music
• Sociology of War, The
• Suburbanism
• Survey Methods
• Symbolic Boundaries
• Symbolic Interactionism
• The Division of Labor after Durkheim
• Tilly, Charles
• Time Use and Childcare
• Time Use and Time Diary Research
• Tourism, Sociology of
• Transnational Adoption
• Unions and Inequality
• Urban Ethnography
• Urban Growth Machine
• Urban Inequality in the United States
• Veblen, Thorstein
• Visual Arts, Music, and Aesthetic Experience
• Wallerstein, Immanuel
• Welfare, Race, and the American Imagination
• Welfare States
• Women’s Employment and Economic Inequality Between Househo...
• Work and Employment, Sociology of
• Work/Life Balance
• Workplace Flexibility
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|185.80.150.64]
• 185.80.150.64

A grandmother and granddaughter from Cape Verde. Photo by O. Louis Mazzatenta/National Geographic

The future is mixed-race

And so is the past. migration and mingling are essential to human success in the past, the present and into the future.

by Scott Solomon   + BIO

In the future, a lot of people might look like Danielle Shewmake, a 21-year-old college student from Fort Worth, Texas. Shewmake has dark, curly hair, brown eyes, and an olive skin tone that causes many to mistake her heritage as Mediterranean. Her actual pedigree is more complex. Her father is half-Cherokee and half-Caucasian, and her mother, who was born in Jamaica, is the child of an Indian mother and an African and Scottish father.

‘My sister and I are just a combination of all that,’ she says, adding that she dislikes having to pick a particular racial identity. She prefers the term ‘mixed’.

Differences in physical traits between human populations accumulated slowly over tens of thousands of years. As people spread across the globe and adapted to local conditions, a combination of natural selection and cultural innovation led to physical distinctions. But these groups did not remain apart. Contact between groups, whether through trade or conflict, led to the exchange of both genes and ideas. Recent insights from the sequencing of hundreds of thousands of human genomes in the past decade have revealed that our species’ history has been punctuated by many episodes of migration and genetic exchange. The mixing of human groups is nothing new.

What is new is the rate of mixing currently underway. Globalisation means that our species is more mobile than ever before. International migration has reached record highs, as has the number of interracial marriages, leading to a surge of multiracial people such as Shewmake. While genetic differences between human populations do not fall neatly along racial lines, race nevertheless provides insight into the extent of population hybridisation currently underway. This reshuffling of human populations is affecting the very structure of the human gene pool.

A rchaeological evidence suggests that Homo sapiens came into existence roughly 200,000 years ago in east Africa. By 50,000 years ago (but possibly earlier ) people had begun to spread out of Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula and into Eurasia, perhaps driven by a changing climate that necessitated a search for new food sources. They made their way across now flooded land bridges to reach Australia and the Americas, and eventually came to inhabit even the most remote Pacific islands.

Evidence of these ancient migrations can be found by examining the DNA of living people as well as DNA recovered from ancient skeletons. In some cases, the genome studies corroborate archaeological and historical records of human movements. The Mongol Empire, the Arab slave trade, the spread of Bantu-speaking peoples across much of Africa and the effects of European colonialism have all left a predictable record within our genomes. In other cases, the genetic data provide surprises and can help archaeologists and historians settle controversies. For example, until recently, it was thought that the Americas were settled by a single wave of nomads who travelled across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait. But recent genome analyses , which include samples from a wide range of indigenous groups, suggest that the Americas might have been colonised by at least four independent waves of settlers.

We are a restless species, and our genomes reveal that even the most intimidating geographical barriers have managed only to somewhat restrict human movements. Today, international migration is increasing at 1 to 2 per cent per year, with 244 million people in 2015 living in a country other than the one in which they were born. The biological implications of this massive experiment in interbreeding we are now witnessing will not be known for generations. But applying what we know about genetics and evolution can help us predict our future, including whether humans will be able to continue adapting to the constantly changing conditions on Earth.

Biological adaptation is a result of natural selection, and natural selection requires diversity. Think of natural selection like a sieve separating one generation from the next. Only the genes from those individuals that are well suited to their environment at that time will reproduce, passing their genes through the sieve to the next generation. Changing conditions alter the shape of the sieve’s holes and thereby which genes can pass through. The more variation there is in the population, the better the chances that some genes present in a generation will be able to pass through the sieve and be inherited by future generations. Unfortunately for us, humans are not very diverse.

We Homo sapiens have less genetic diversity than do many species of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – our closest living relatives – despite the fact that each of these are so few in number that they are considered either endangered or critically endangered. Our low diversity is due to the fact that we have only recently become so numerous (whereas the opposite is true for our primate cousins). There are now roughly 7.5 billion living humans, but just 100 years ago there were fewer than 2 billion. Our population has exploded in the recent past, and is continuing to grow , with some 130 million babies born each year. Each baby carries on average 60 new mutations in its genes. With these new gene variants comes the potential for future evolutionary change.

People today are more likely to live in an environment for which they are not biologically well-suited

Our ability to continue to adapt to the changing conditions on Earth improves as new genetic variation is introduced to our gene pool through mutations. But the entire human gene pool is made of many smaller gene pools, each corresponding to a particular population. The movement of people around the Earth is mixing these populations, allowing genes to flow back and forth between gene pools, with several important implications for our ongoing evolution.

Let’s start with the downsides. Like all species, human groups became adapted to local environments as we spread around the world. Yet the rapid movement of people between regions and the mixing of people with distinct characteristics means that people today are more likely to live in an environment for which they are not biologically well-suited.

Consider natural resistance to infectious diseases, which evolved in places where such diseases were common. Such geographical associations are being eroded by global migration. The prevalence of malaria, which continues to cause some 400,000 deaths each year and is especially deadly to children, has resulted in the evolution of physiological protections from infection. Examples include sickle cell disease and thalassaemia – blood conditions that can create health problems of their own but that nevertheless afford protection from the deadly disease and were therefore favoured by natural selection in regions where malaria was common. Today, sickle cell and thalassaemia exist in places without malaria as a result both of migration and of the local eradication of malaria.

Likewise, many people live in regions where their skin pigmentation is not ideal for the local sunlight intensity. The colour of human skin is determined by the amount of the pigment eumelanin, which acts as a natural sunscreen. Having a lot of eumelanin is an advantage for those who live in a place where sunlight is intense and, since our species originated in tropical Africa, the first humans were probably dark-skinned. Lighter skin evolved later in populations that migrated out of the tropics, into regions where sunlight hits the Earth more obliquely. Not only is eumelanin needed less in such regions, it is actually problematic because our bodies require sunlight to penetrate the skin in order to produce vitamin D. With too much eumelanin, dark-skinned people living at high latitudes risk developing nutritional disorders such as rickets, which causes the skeleton to become deformed. This trade-off – having either too much or too little sunlight penetrating the skin – caused human populations to evolve eumelanin levels that are appropriate for their region. As people move around the world, mismatches between eumelanin and local sunlight intensity result in skin cancer and vitamin D deficiencies, both of which are considered epidemics in some regions.

A s populations blend, medium skin tones will become more common. Eumelanin production is determined by numerous genes, so when people with different skin tones have children, these children inherit a combination of gene versions from each parent, resulting in skin tones that are likely to be intermediate between that of their parents.

Such blending is expected for complex traits encoded by multiple genes, such as skin pigmentation or height. But some characteristics, such as having dry earwax or thick hair, are controlled by just a single gene. Blending is not possible for these traits, which a person either has or does not have, based on the genes inherited from the parents. What population-mixing might cause, however, is combinations of traits that were previously rare, such as dark skin and blue eyes . Just such a combination can already be found in the Cape Verde islands, whose modern population is descended from Portuguese and West Africans.

In many parts of the world, blending is well underway. In highly diverse urban centres such as Singapore, inter-ethnic marriages are rising quickly – from just 7.6 percent of all marriages in 1990 to 21.5 per cent in 2015. In the United States, interracial marriages have doubled since 1980. Not surprisingly, the number of multiracial US children climbed 10-fold over roughly the same time span, up from just 1 per cent of all births in 1970 to 10 per cent in 2013. In Brazil, where European, African and indigenous populations have been mixing for centuries, some 43 per cent of the population identifies as ‘ pardo ’, or mixed-race, according to a 2010 census .

A distinct advantage of this blending is that beneficial traits present in one population can make their way into the other. For instance, should a mutation appear somewhere in southeast Asia that provides protection against the Zika virus, it wouldn’t help those facing the current outbreak in South and Central America. Yet if someone with the mutation moved to South America and established a family there, the mutation could save lives and hence be passed to future generations.

A striking example comes from one of the highest altitude regions on Earth, the Tibetan plateau. Because the air is thinner at higher altitudes, there is less oxygen available to breathe – 40 per cent less in the case of the Tibetan plateau, much of which exceeds 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) above sea level. Low oxygen levels are especially problematic for childbirth, and complications such as preeclampsia (a pregnancy disorder) are more common at higher altitudes. Although people from lower altitudes who spend extended amounts of time at high altitude can partially adjust by making more red blood cells to capture oxygen, this is an imperfect solution as it can lead to a condition known as chronic mountain sickness.

After a tryst between a modern human and a Denisovan, a child was conceived, who left descendants, some of whom became Tibetans

Yet Tibetans, whose ancestors have lived on the plateau for at least 30,000 years, are well-adapted to the low-oxygen environment, thanks in part to particular versions of the genes EGLN1 and EPAS1 , which are involved in sensing and adjusting to oxygen levels. In a paper published in 2014, the geneticist Anna Di Rienzo, the anthropologist Cynthia Beall and colleagues showed that Tibetans can trace their ancestry to two previously distinct populations, related to modern Han Chinese and Sherpa. By examining the genomes of all three living populations – Tibetans, Han Chinese and Sherpa – the researchers pieced together a sequence of events in which people from the lowlands related to the modern Han Chinese migrated to higher altitudes, where they mixed with those already present (relatives of the Sherpa). The beneficial EGLN1 and EPAS1 gene versions were thought to already be present in the relatives of the Sherpa, and acquiring these gene versions helped the newcomers to survive and pass on their genes.

But how did the relatives of the Sherpa come to acquire the beneficial versions of their genes in the first place? This, too, seems to be a result of mixing – not just between two different human populations but between two different species . Remarkably, the version of the EPAS1 gene associated with high-altitude adaptation was found in the DNA of the extinct cousins of the Neanderthals known as Denisovans, whose fossilised remains were found in a Siberian cave in 2010. The population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen and colleagues inferred from this that the EPAS1 variant made its way into the human gene pool following a tryst between a modern human and a Denisovan, members of different species that nonetheless conceived a child who survived and left descendants, some of whom became modern Tibetans.

Although the EPAS1 gene variant acquired from Denisovans is known only from Tibetans and Han Chinese, other traces of Denisovan DNA can be found in modern people living across much of South and East Asia, Australia, New Guinea and Oceania. Likewise, genes from Neanderthals, who lived in western Eurasia, can be found in all living human populations except Africans. Genomic surveys have recently detected evidence of mixing with additional extinct relatives – species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans but who are thus far unknown from the fossil record.

T he benefits that come from mixing genes from different populations are well-known to plant and animal breeders. Hybrid corn, for example, outperforms pure varieties when planted in the same fields. This was first demonstrated by the geneticist H G Shull with experiments begun in 1906. Based on his results and corroborated by further research, hybrid corn varieties became more popular in the 1920s and ’30s. Today, according to the US Department of Agriculture, 95 per cent of all corn grown in the US is hybrid corn, which is 20 per cent more productive and uses 25 per cent less land.

Mixing genes is not only beneficial; when mixing doesn’t occur, there can be negative consequences. Consider purebred dogs. A 2013 study from the University of California, Davis compared veterinary records of 27,254 purebred and mixed-breed dogs, and identified 10 different genetic disorders, including elbow dysplasia and cataracts, that purebred dogs are more likely to suffer than mixed-breeds. Generations of exclusively same-breed mating has caused an accumulation of recessive alleles, which are likely to be masked by a dominant allele when crossed with a different breed.

As the world’s population becomes increasingly mixed, some genetic disorders will become less common

Similar effects are found in humans. About 10 per cent of all marriages today occur among close relatives, defined as second cousins or closer. The highest rates are in North Africa and the Middle East, and among immigrants from these regions, where marriage among kin is often encouraged for religious or social reasons. Although genetic counselling is needed to determine the precise risks, in general, the more closely related the parents are, the more likely their children will have birth defects or genetic disorders. The children of first cousins are 2-3 per cent more likely to have certain birth defects, including deafness and heart defects, and 2-4 per cent more likely to have recessive genetic disorders.

While marriages among relatives remain common in certain regions, the worldwide trend is in the opposite direction. When both parents are very distantly related, as happens when their ancestors come from different human populations, the chances of both having a recessive allele for the same gene is extremely low. Consequently, as the world’s population becomes increasingly mixed, some genetic disorders will become less and less common.

I f the history of life on Earth can teach us anything, it is this: as conditions change, species either adapt or become extinct. In our time of considerable environmental change, humanity should consider its options. No species, even the almighty Homo sapiens , can stop evolution completely. But we can choose to limit our capacity for ongoing biological adaptation in an effort to remain ever the same by keeping populations isolated. Of course, such decisions are not made by humanity as a whole but by individuals and governments. Nationalism and xenophobia, on the rise in the US and Europe, threaten to decrease genetic exchange between populations, stifling our ability to continue evolving and adapting.

Alternatively, we can embrace immigration and globalisation in an effort to position ourselves for a brighter future. The underlying causes of the current high rates of human migration are likely to persist, and perhaps to increase, as the global human population continues to grow. Access to natural resources such as fresh water have long driven population movements, and these might become even more important drivers of migration as the world’s population expands. Likewise, as economic development proceeds, the amount of resources used by each person will continue to rise, putting further pressure on scarce resources and further motivating people to move in search of better conditions. Sea levels are expected to continue rising as a result of global climate change, and this is likely to drive large-scale population movements away from low-lying coastal areas as they become uninhabitable. In short, the reshuffling of populations that results from the movement of people around the world will continue to shape the structure of our gene pool – and, by extension, our future evolution – for many generations to come.

People such as Danielle Shewmake who identify their heritage as mixed are likely to become increasingly common. She believes that this has already happened within just a generation. ‘My mom always used to joke about how all her friends were multiracial couples and she thought that was so cool, and it was like different and cool,’ she said. ‘But now it’s like normal and cool.’

History of technology

Why America fell for guns

The US today has extraordinary levels of gun ownership. But to see this as a venerable tradition is to misread history

The scourge of lookism

It is time to take seriously the painful consequences of appearance discrimination in the workplace

Andrew Mason

Economic history

The southern gap

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy

Keri Leigh Merritt

Thinkers and theories

Our tools shape our selves

For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience

Bryan Norton

Family life

A patchwork family

After my marriage failed, I strove to create a new family – one made beautiful by the loving way it’s stitched together

The cell is not a factory

Scientific narratives project social hierarchies onto nature. That’s why we need better metaphors to describe cellular life

Charudatta Navare

• United Kingdom

The Biracial Bind Of Not Being Asian Enough

More from us news, r29 original series.

Read our research on: Gun Policy | International Conflict | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

Who is multiracial depends on how you ask, a comparison of six survey methods to capture racial identity.

Consider, for example, a man whose mother is Asian and whose father is white. This may seem like someone who could easily be categorized as multiracial. But if this man was raised with little or no interaction with his white relatives or had experiences that were more closely aligned with those of the Asian community, he may well select “Asian” and nothing else when describing his race. Furthermore, some adults may have relatives of different races farther back in their family tree. While some people may think to include a more distant relative of a different race when asked about their racial background, others may not, even if they are aware of their family history.

With this in mind, we set out to test six different ways of defining a population of mixed-race adults to survey, using as our primary vehicle Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a probability-based, nationally representative online panel of adults in the United States. We tested these different approaches with impaneled individuals who participated in more than one Pew Research Center survey, allowing us to examine how the same individual might have changed his or her responses depending on the question asked.

In this report, we share the results of these six survey experiments with a focus on the ways in which the different wordings of the stem, different response options and different modes used impacted the projected size of the U.S. multiracial population. We also look at the consistency in selecting two or more races across different measures at the individual level, as well as how estimates of specific subgroups of multiracial adults—most notably white and American Indian biracial adults—vary by question type.

Census Alternative Questionnaire Experiment measure. We then tested a question being considered for the 2020 decennial census, in which the Hispanic origin response option is included with the racial categories in a “mark one or more” format. Using this measure, called the Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE), we found that 4.8% of adults reported two or more races (not including Hispanic or some other race).

Census AQE measure with parents’ races. Some researchers have argued that the population with a mixed racial background is likely broader than the share of adults who report two or more races when asked to identify their own race in a “mark one or more” format. One of the ways we tested this theory was by exploring the race and ethnicity of respondents’ parents and grandparents. First, we asked those who chose only one race in the AQE measure whether either their mother or father was “some other race or origin” than the race they selected for themselves. This roughly doubled the share reporting a multiracial background to 10.8%.

Census AQE measure with parents’ and grandparents’ races. For those who said they did not have a parent of a different race, we asked whether any of their grandparents were “some other race or origin” than their own, which increased the share indicating a multiracial background to 16.6%. As discussed below, because of the way the follow-up questions were worded, we believe the share of single-race adults indicating that they have a parent or grandparent of a different race overestimates the multiracial population.

Point allocation measure. Next, we tested an experimental measure developed by University of California, Berkeley political scientist Taeku Lee in which respondents are given 10 “identity points” and asked to allocate them across different racial and ethnic categories however they see fit. For example, if they think of themselves as half white and half black, they could allocate five points to each, but if they think of themselves as mostly white, but had a black ancestor, they could allocate nine points to white and one point to black. This measure was developed to increase the share of adults reporting two or more races, and the Pew Research Center analysis finds that it does compared with the “mark one or more” approaches—some 12.7% of adults gave points to two or more races using this measure.

Attitudinal measure. Finally, we asked people directly, “Do you consider yourself to be mixed race; that is, belonging to more than one racial group?” Taking this approach, 12.0% of adults identified themselves as multiracial.

The remainder of this report will discuss in detail the various methods Pew Research Center tested to measure respondents’ racial backgrounds, including exact question wording, as well as an assessment of the resulting racial composition and of the challenges or concerns that each question elicits. Furthermore, because these questions were asked of the same individuals in different interviews, we are also able to examine whether the same individual changed his or her responses depending on the type of question asked. This report will look at the consistency in selecting two or more races at the individual level across the different methods, including among various multiracial subgroups. A more detailed breakdown of the racial composition of the adult population captured by the different measures, as well as a comparison of other demographics of the multiracial population captured by each measure, can be found in the tables in Appendix A .

• Throughout this report, the terms “multiracial,” “mixed race” and “multiple race” are used interchangeably. When discussing measures in which a respondent selects one or more races, “two or more races” and “more than one race” are also used. ↩
• See, for example, Morin (2015) , Saperstein and Penner (2014) , Compton et al. (2013) , Gullickson and Morning (2011) , Doyle and Kao (2007) , Harris (2002) , Harris and Sim (2002) , Brunsma and Rockquemore (2001) and Goldstein and Morning (2000) . ↩
• Using a similar method, the Census Bureau found that 2.1% of adults reported two or more races in the 2013 American Community Survey. (The Census Bureau estimates include those who gave a single race along with the “some other race” category as multiracial. The Pew Research Center estimates do not include “some other race” as a racial category.) ↩

Social Trends Monthly Newsletter

Sign up to to receive a monthly digest of the Center's latest research on the attitudes and behaviors of Americans in key realms of daily life

Report Materials

Table of contents, changing partisan coalitions in a politically divided nation, rising numbers of americans say jews and muslims face a lot of discrimination, how u.s. muslims are experiencing the israel-hamas war, how u.s. jews are experiencing the israel-hamas war, key facts about asian americans living in poverty, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Being Multiracial in a Country that Sees Black and White

In America mixed race individuals are becoming more prominent in the media, politics and sports throughout the country. Some of the most popular mixed race individuals that we see everyday include Tiger Woods, Vin Diesel, Mariah Carey, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Derek Jeter, Halley Berry, Alicia Keys and of course President Obama. The fact that this population of mixed race individuals is growing at an astounding rate is the reason behind the current discussion on the racial classification of such individuals.  Before the 1960s many researchers considered “biracial identity [to be] equivalent to black identity…or a subset of blacks” (Rockquemore 21).  This thought continued to exist in the United States by researchers until the 1990s [sic] when “biracial people were [considered] a separate [racial] group” (21). The multiracial movement that has arisen during the 1990s believes that “every person, especially every child, who is multi-ethnic/interracial has the same right as any other person to assert an identity that embraces the fullness and  integrity of their actual ancestry” (Tessman 1). Although there are overall positive effects for these individuals from the movement, there are also negative affects that could potentially cause more problems for America’s current racial system. However, despite the negative effects of the movement, there is evidence that shows that this potential transition to a multiracial system in the US has beneficial aspects to it

Mixed race individuals have been recorded to exist “as far back as the 1630s and 1640s [in] colonial records” (Morning 41). How we have come to understand these individuals and their racial identity in the US has changed over time since then. Historically, “children of black/white interracial marriages have been considered part of the African American community” (Rockquemore 35).  However, within the past decade, there has been a shift by “multiracial advocates [who] proposed an alternative racial identification by seeking to have ‘multiracial’ added as a legitimate and distinct racial category” (35).  By adding such a category, the advocates claimed that it would allow mixed race individuals to “accurately reflect the way that mixed race people self-identify” (35). 

One of the main issues to why this change would be necessary can be explained in the Robert Park’s Marginal Man Theory (36).  In this theory, “the Marginal Man is poised outside of the two races to which he belongs, never fully accepted by either but instead a stranger in both worlds” (36). These psychological issues of rejection, isolation and other negative experiences from both racial groups, to which one could identify with, has been seen to be a tremendous issue for mixed race individuals. One of the most public individuals that have had to deal with these psychological problems mentioned is the American president. A black congressman of Missouri, Emanuel Cleaver, “claimed that Barack doesn’t speak like black people… [implying] that he was too polished or too white” (Hendon 22).  Mixed race individuals are constantly in “conflict between social and personal definitions of self, justifying identity choice, forced choice dilemmas, lack of role models, conflicting messages and double rejections” (Rockquemore 37).  We are constantly analyzed by racial groups around us to whether we are black enough, white enough, Asian enough, etc. These issues are the foundation behind the movement beginning in the 1990s, however though out the movement there have been pros and cons.

France Twine, a cultural anthropologist who did a case-study on biracial females, explains in her article that race is culturally determined and how someone classifies themselves can depend on tradition, history, or personal experiences (Twine 1).   A positive effect of the multiracial movement is that by having this racial category, it would allow a person to be able to classify themselves as multiracial based on such factors mentioned by Twine. Another positive effect of the movement is that by allowing this new classification, the government could better provide for this population. Alfredo J. Padilla, who is an education manager at the Marvin Foundation, states that “under the old guidelines multiracial people were rendered invisible, which makes it impossible for institutions of higher education to address their unique needs" (Kean 1).  The final and most important positive effect that the movement has are the overall psychological benefits, by enforcing a multiracial category, for mixed race individuals. Lisa Tessman, who is the writer of the article  Racial Politics of Mixed Race , has observed through her readings that if an individual is pressured into choosing one race over another it could have “detrimental affects on self concept, self esteem, and development…particularly [in] children” (Tessman 1). It is acknowledged by many researchers, who study mixed raced individuals, that “in order to develop competence and move towards psychological well-being, it is necessary for [mixed race] individuals to identify as biracial or multiracial rather than monoracial” (Carter & Coleman 2).  For these reasons, many advocates believe that this movement is beneficial, however, despite the good in the movement there are obvious and detrimental negative affects that it has on society as well.

The negative aspects that surround this movement are unintentionally strengthening the ideology of hypodescent, which reverses the strides made by the civil rights movement, and can potentially cause the development of a pigmentrocratic system in the US.  These obvious negative effects should be considered when deciding whether or not the movement is actually beneficial to society. Enforcing hypodescent, which is the first negative effect, means to enforce the concept behind the “display [of] the positive valuation of whiteness and the corresponding negative valuation of blackness” (Sundstrom 288).  By trying to create this additional racial category, many of those who study race believe it will give off the message that mixed race individuals don’t want to associate with minority groups.   This additional category will actually enforce the ideology that we currently have in the US and “encourages white privilege” (288). These “conscious or subconscious [attempts] to escape blackness” (286) is not only causing “self hate, internalized racism and psychological damage [to the] nature of America’s racial [polity]” (288-289), but it is also “undermining the civil rights efforts” made just a few decades ago in the US (289).

The Civil Rights Movement, which began in order to gain equality for African Americans in the US, has been undermined by the multiracial movement because it “provides a personal solution, the mulatto escape hatch, to racism” (289). Instead of claiming a minority identity, the supporters and individuals involved in the movement claim a “mixed race identity [which uplifts an individual on the racial ladder] by emphasizing their identification and familial relation to whites” (289).  This personal solution to the racism problem has its obvious negative effects.  Individuals who are of a minority status may begin to encourage others in their racial category to “marry up the hierarchy of color” (289).  The idea of “passing” becomes an issue where minorities will begin to in a way “sell out or accept the racial status quo…conducting a conspiracy of silence that seeks to beat oppression at its own game” (Daniel, 49).  The fact that some individuals would feel that they need to marry white individuals in order for their kids to be better off in the world leads many to believe that a pigmentrocratic system may be in order for the US.  This type of racial system has already found its way in some countries, such as Brazil, and threatens to soon find its way in the US. 

In Brazil there is this “color caste system, or pigmentocracy” that exists that has caused many to believe that if the multiracial movement isn’t stopped the US will soon develop such a system. This caste system not only relates to the color of your skin but it also ties into the amount of privileges, the amount of money or your overall social class that you may have. A study conducted by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M, supports this claim.  He suggests in his study that the new racial order that could potentially develop would include a “racial strata (white, honorary white and the collective black)…where being nonwhite meant having restricted access to the multiple ‘wages of whiteness’ such as good housing, descent jobs and a good education” (Bonilla-Silva, 932). He further supported his prognosis of the future of the US racial system by looking into the income of his racial stratus.  It was found, in his study, that there were already signs of a difference in income for these particular groups, which demonstrates that this transgression into a multiracial state may already be occurring in the US (936).

Despite all of the negative affects that could come from the multiracial movement I do still believe that it is necessary. Unless you are mixed race yourself you may not understand how difficult it is for someone like me to belong in certain racial groups. Personally, I have a mixed ancestry including German, African American, Native American and European.  Although there are four categories to which I could belong to I never once felt like I truly belonged to either. It was either because I didn’t act the way people in that group acted, talked the right way or even dress the right way; which all are primarily stereotypes we have on one another.  Depending on who I was around I would try to change myself in order to feel like I belonged more with them but really I never felt accepted. It wasn’t until I met other mixed raced individuals at the university when I felt like I really belonged to a racial group; multiracial. For these reasons, this movement is beneficial. It could potentially help mixed race people feel like they belong somewhere and with a certain group. There is also evidence to why this movement would not have such a negative affect on society if it were to continue.

As mentioned in the study conducted by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, if the US became a tri-racial system, due to the multiracial movement, there are some beneficial aspects from that for society. One of the beneficial aspects, that he hypothesizes, is that the racial conflicts that we currently have will be buffered by this intermediate group, the multiracial group; as seen with the middle class with the social economic classes of the US (Bonilla-Silva 933).  Another beneficial aspect of the movement is that “Americans, like people in complex racial stratification orders, will begin making nationalists’ appeals (‘We are all Americans’), decry their racial past, and claim they are ‘beyond race’” (933).  This is obviously beneficial because then there wouldn’t really be an issue of discrimination or racism in the country.  Everyone would look to one another as Americans and not as Asian Americans, African American, or even Caucasian. There would be no race to divide the county under Bonilla-Silva’s perspective. From this study, although some may believe a pigmentrocratic system is a bad thing, there are beneficial aspects of it.  Because of that, I do believe that this movement will be an overall good for the country despite some of its downfalls.

Race is never an easy issue to discuss, let alone the possibility of mixed race.  There will always be someone who believes there should not be any race because it is not biologically determined. There will always be someone who believes having a multiracial category is unnecessary because to be pure white or black is not possible. Race is undeniably a social construct that the world has and although we are in a post racist society we are not in a post race society. With that being said having a multiracial category is something that is needed in order to understand those around us; the purpose of having racial classification in the first place. We no longer can have a black and white racial system because the world is not black and white.  There are various shades in between and we need to change our racial system in order to reflect that. By keeping the multiracial movement going one day I hope to be able to do just that.

In reflection, this topic truly was at times a difficult one to take on. There are so many issues revolving around race that to bring in the question of a new racial category is difficult. Each person has their own opinions and in the course of writing this paper their opinions did have an influence on my own views on this topic that I held in the beginning. After looking at both sides of the argument I have come full circle and am now able, in the forth paper, to say why this movement is beneficial. It is beneficial because when you have a mixed ancestry like mine it is hard to feel like you truly belong to any racial group without proving your space there. By having this racial category I wouldn’t have to worry about proving myself because I belong solely based on my mixed ancestry and that’s it. I think writing about this topic really has opened my eyes as to the bigger issues that this country faces dealing with race and I hope to continue to discover why it is we have such issues. Will we ever be able to see past someone’s skin color or will this always be the way it is in America? I hope one day that we are so that my kids won’t have to grow up feeling unwelcomed by the racial groups around them.

Works Cited

Beeth, Howard. “Pigmentocracy, Melting Pot, Mosaic, Salad or Stew: Some Current Thinking about Race in the USA”. The Oral History Review. 22.1 (1995): 95-104. Jstor. University of Maryland, College Park. 4/18/09 <www.jstor.org/stable/158162>

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA”. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 27.6 (2004): 931-950. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 4/18/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Brunsma, David L. Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 4/15/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Coleman, Victoria H. and M.M Carter. “Biracial Self-Identification: Impact on Trait Anxiety, Social Anxiety, and Depression.” An International Journal of Theory and Research 7.2 (2007): 103-114. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/24/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Daniel, G.R. More than Black: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002

Fernandez, Ronald. America Beyond Black and White: How Immigrants and Fusions are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000

Hendon, Rickey. Black Enough, White Enough: the Obama Dilemma. Chicago: Third World Press, 2009

Kean, Sam. “Education Department May Give Students More Options in Identifying Their Race.”  Chronicle of Higher Education, 53.2 (2006) Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/11/09  <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Rockquemore, Kerry A. and Brunsma, David L. Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. 2nd ed. USA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2008

Rodriguez, Gregory. “Multiracial Americans Deserve Better than ‘Other’” Christian Science Monitor.   14 October, 1997:223 Academic Search Premier.Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/29/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Sanchez, Diana T. and Margret Shih. “Perspectives and Research on the Positive and Negative Implications of Having Multiple Racial Identities.” 131.4 (2005):569-591 Academic Search Premier. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park  3/24/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Skidmore, Thomas E. “Bi-Racial U.S.A. vs. Multi-Racial Brazil: Is the Contrast Still Valid?” Journal of Latin American Studies. 25.2 (1993): 373-386. Jstor.  University of  Maryland, College Park. 4/18/09 <www.jstor.org/stable/158162>

Sundstrom, Ronald R. “Being and Being Mixed Race”. Social Theory and Practice. 27.2 (2001): 285-307. Academic Search Premier. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 4/11/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Sexton, Jared. “The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”. Social Identities. 9.2 (2003): 241-275. Academic Search Premier. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 4/14/09   <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Taylor, Africa & Karen Sun. “Biracial kids: The best of both worlds?”  New York Amsterdam News 09/30/99 Academic Search Premier. Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/20/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Tessman, Lisa. “The Racial Politics of Mixed Race”. Journal of Social Philosophy 30.2 (1999): 276-294 Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/11/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Twine, France W. “Brown skinned white girls: Class, culture and the construction of white  identity in suburban... “ Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 3.2 (1996) Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/11/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Viadero, Debra. “Mixed Heritage Said to Present Complex Issues,” Education Week. 21 Jan, 2009:18 Academic Search Premier, University of Maryland, College Park 3/11/09 <http://web.ebscohost.com>

Winters, Loretta I. and Debose, Herman L. New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st century. California: Sage Publications Inc., 2003.

Articles copyright © 2024 the original authors. No part of the contents of this Web journal may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the author or the Academic Writing Program of the University of Maryland. The views expressed in these essays do not represent the views of the Academic Writing Program or the University of Maryland.

How to Talk About Race on College Applications, According to Admissions Experts

R afael Figueroa, dean of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy, was in the middle of tutoring Native American and Native Hawaiian students on how to write college application essays when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious college admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional .

Earlier in the week, he told the students that they shouldn’t feel like they need to talk about their ethnicity in their essays. But after the June 29 Supreme Court ruling , he backtracked. “If I told you that you didn’t have to write about your native or cultural identity, you need to get ready to do another supplemental essay” on it or prepare a story that can fit into short answer questions, he says he told them.

For high school seniors of color applying to colleges in the coming years, the essay and short answer sections will take on newfound importance. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested as much when he wrote in his majority opinion, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” That “discussion” is usually in an essay, and many colleges have additional short-answer questions that allow students to expand more on their background and where they grew up.

“The essay is going to take up a lot more space than maybe it has in the past because people are going to be really trying to understand who this person is that is going to come into our community,” says Timothy Fields, senior associate dean of undergraduate admission at Emory University.

Now, college admissions officers are trying to figure out how to advise high schoolers on their application materials to give them the best chance to showcase their background under the new rules, which will no longer allow colleges or universities to use race as an explicit factor in admissions decisions .

Shereem Herndon-Brown, who co-wrote The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions with Fields, says students of color can convey their racial and ethnic backgrounds by writing about their families and their upbringing. “I’ve worked with students for years who have written amazing essays about how they spend Yom Kippur with their family, which clearly signals to a college that they are Jewish—how they listened to the conversations from their grandfather about escaping parts of Europe… Their international or immigrant story comes through whether it’s from the Holocaust or Croatia or the Ukraine. These are stories that kind of smack colleges in the face about culture.”

“Right now, we’re asking Black and brown kids to smack colleges in the face about being Black and brown,” he continues. “And, admittedly, I am mixed about the necessity to do it. But I think the only way to do it is through writing.”

Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

Students of color who are involved in extracurriculars that are related to diversity efforts should talk about those prominently in their college essays, other experts say. Maude Bond, director of college counseling at Cate School in Santa Barbara County, California, cites one recent applicant she counseled who wrote her college essay about an internship with an anti-racism group and how it helped her highlight the experiences of Asian American Pacific Islanders in the area.

Bond also says there are plenty of ways for people of color to emphasize their resilience and describe the character traits they learned from overcoming adversity: “Living in a society where you’re navigating racism every day makes you very compassionate.” she says. “It gives you a different sense of empathy and understanding. Not having the same resources as people that you grow up with makes you more creative and innovative.” These, she argues, are characteristics students should highlight in their personal essays.

Adam Nguyen, a former Columbia University admissions officer who now counsels college applicants via his firm Ivy Link, will also encourage students of color to ask their teachers and college guidance counselors to hint at their race or ethnicity in their recommendation letters. “That’s where they could talk about your racial background,” Nguyen says. “Just because you can’t see what’s written doesn’t mean you can’t influence how or what is said about you.”

Yet as the essay portions of college applications gain more importance, the process of reading applications will take a lot longer, raising the question of whether college admissions offices have enough staffers to get through the applications. “There are not enough admission officers in the industry to read that way,” says Michael Pina, director of admission at the University of Richmond.

That could make it even more difficult for students to get the individual attention required to gain acceptance to the most elite colleges. Multiple college admissions experts say college-bound students will need to apply to a broader range of schools. “You should still apply to those 1% of colleges…but you should think about the places that are producing high-quality graduates that are less selective,” says Pina.

One thing more Black students should consider, Fields argues, is applying to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). (In fact, Fields, a graduate of Morehouse College, claims that may now be “necessary” for some students.) “There’s something to be said, for a Black person to be in a majority environment someplace that they are celebrated, not tolerated,” Fields says. “There’s something to be said about being in an environment where you don’t have to justify why you’re here.”

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
• Stop Looking for Your Forever Home
• The Sympathizer Counters 50 Years of Hollywood Vietnam War Narratives
• The Bliss of Seeing the Eclipse From Cleveland
• Hormonal Birth Control Doesn’t Deserve Its Bad Reputation
• The Best TV Shows to Watch on Peacock
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [email protected]

You May Also Like

• TODAY Plaza
• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Music Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show

Craig Melvin on raising mixed-race children: ‘We figure it out as we go along’

For Black History Month, TODAY's Craig Melvin shares his experience of being a father to kids Delano, 9, and Sybil, 7, with wife Lindsay Czarniak.

When Lindsay and I started thinking about marriage, we never talked about the fact that eventually we would have mixed-race kids. Looking back on it, maybe we should have. But it was not something that was front of mind when we were dating.

Even after we got married, we never discussed what it would be like to raise biracial children. I don’t think we talked about it because we didn’t have any experience in that space. She doesn’t come from a family that is diverse and neither do I. In my book, “Pops,” I wrote about the first time I told my Grandma Florence, who had a mistrust of white people, that I was dating Lindsay. I was nervous about the conversation and Grandma Florence cut me off and said, “I know she’s white. I know, I know.” And that was it, the end of the race discussion.

But now that we have Delano and Sybil , we’ve essentially had to figure it out as we go along. I remember reading something years ago about the idea that biracial children, at some point in their lives, begin to identify with a race. I was a bit incredulous about whether it was true, but since then I’ve also heard it from other parents of mixed-race children. For some, it happens when they are young and for others it may not be until they are older or they become parents. ‘ ’

It’s been interesting to watch Delano, who is 9, because I think that he has started to identify as Black, as African American. Just based on some of the conversations that we’ve had recently and some of the things that he has said, I think that’s starting to happen.

Sibby is still young at 7, but even she is showing some signs of self-identity. She’s been drawing self-portraits for years now. A couple of months ago, she drew a picture of herself on a horse. And it’s the first time she went out of her way to make her face a darker complexion than it is. I deliberately didn’t ask her about it, even though I wanted to, because I don’t want to have any sort of influence on how she views herself in this world and how she identifies. In the past, I’ve always noticed that she colors her blonde hair and puts on her freckles, and she’s pale in most of the pictures. When she gave it to me, I said, “Sibby — who is this? Who is the girl on the horse?” She looked at me and said, “Daddy, that’s me.” I quickly responded, “Of course. Of course that’s you.”

What we have done, deliberately, is really try to expose our kids to both of our backgrounds. We’ve introduced them to Black history as well as Polish history, which is Lindsay’s ancestry. For example, during the holidays we go out of our way to incorporate as many Polish and African-American traditions as possible. Every January, we make the kids watch — from beginning to end — the entire “I Have A Dream” speech and it always sparks conversation and questions.

Recently, I had the honor of moderating a talk with civil rights attorney Clarence Jones, who was part of Dr. Martin Luther King’s inner circle, and it was important to have both of my kids there to sort of help connect some dots. As they have gotten older, I have found that it’s easier to have some of the more difficult conversations about race in America when there’s a jumping off point that is historical.

Being able to bring living history to our town and introduce my children to Clarence really helped bridge the divide that often exists between past and present. Shonda Rhimes, who lives in our town, happened to be there as well, as Clarence is her godfather. So I was able to say to my daughter, “This is Shonda Rhimes, one of the most successful writers and producers of our time.” For my little girl to get to talk to Ms. Rhimes, and to see Black excellence personified, that’s everything.

As for role models to my kids, I am convinced that one of the major reasons Del became such a big Kansas City Chiefs fan is because he did see himself in Patrick Mahomes. He loves football and started to notice this kid, who had skin that looks like his, and hair that looked like his, performing on a national stage. Representation matters, and we know that to be true.

I have not yet had “the talk” with Del about what it means to be a Black man in America and how it impacts the way you respond to certain situations. He’s only in fourth grade. I have a group of about 10 to 12 Black dads in my town who I have lunch with once a month. It’s a small group, because we live in a very white town. We are of varying ages, and are fathers of sons and daughters of varying ages. This topic came up at one of our lunches. At what point do you have that conversation? I mean, obviously you have to have it before they get to high school. But what I don’t want to do too early is warp his innocence.

My 9-year-old son still wears onesie pajamas, like with the footies. He still sleeps with all of his stuffies. But he also needs to wear deodorant now. So he’s at that tipping point. I know it’s a conversation in our very near future.

Craig Melvin, as told to Kavita Varma-White

This website uses cookies.

By clicking the "Accept" button or continuing to browse our site, you agree to first-party and session-only cookies being stored on your device to enhance site navigation and analyze site performance and traffic. For more information on our use of cookies, please see our Privacy Policy .

• Journal of Economic Literature
• A Review Essay on Howard Bodenhorn's The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

A Review Essay on Howard Bodenhorn's The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

• Allison Shertzer
• Article Information

Additional Materials

• Author Disclosure Statement(s) (3.43 KB)

JEL Classification

• N31 Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913