Mixed Race Studies

Identity Denied: Comparing American or White Identity Denial and Psychological Health Outcomes Among Bicultural and Biracial People

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
First Published 2018-08-07
DOI: 10.1177/0146167218788553

Analia F. Albuja
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Because bicultural and biracial people have two identities within one social domain (culture or race), their identification is often challenged by others. Although it is established that identity denial is associated with poor psychological health, the processes through which this occurs are less understood. Across two high-powered studies, we tested identity autonomy, the perceived compatibility of identities, and social belonging as mediators of the relationship between identity denial and well-being among bicultural and biracial individuals. Bicultural and biracial participants who experienced challenges to their American or White identities felt less freedom in choosing an identity and perceived their identities as less compatible, which was ultimately associated with greater reports of depressive symptoms and stress. Study 2 replicated these results and measured social belonging, which also accounted for significant variance in well-being. The results suggest the processes were similar across populations, highlighting important implications for the generalizability to other dual-identity populations.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black + White = Not White: A minority bias in categorizations of Black-White multiracials

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 78, September 2018
pages 43-54
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2018.05.002

Jacqueline M. Chen, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
University of Utah

Kristin Pauker, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

David L. Hamilton, Research Professor, Professor Emeritus
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeffrey W. Sherman, Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis

Highlights

• We examined the categorization of Black-White multiracial faces using novel methods.
• Multiracials were implicitly categorized separately from Black and White targets.
• Multiracials were explicitly categorized into many non-White racial groups.
• “Non-White” categorizations of multiracials occurred very quickly.

The present research sought to provide new insights on the principles guiding the categorization of Black-White multiracial faces at a first encounter. Previous studies have typically measured categorization of multiracial faces using close-ended tasks that constrain available categorizations. Those studies find evidence that perceivers tend to categorize multiracials as Black more often than as White. Two studies used less constrained, implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit categorization (Experiment 2) tasks and found that multiracial faces were most frequently categorized into racial minority groups but not necessarily as Black. These studies suggested a minority bias in multiracial categorizations, whereby multiracials are more frequently categorized as non-White than as White. Experiment 3 provided additional support for the minority bias, showing that participants categorized multiracials as “Not White” more often than as any other category. Participants were also faster to exclude multiracial faces from the White category than from any other racial category. Together, these findings are the first to document the minority bias as a guiding principle in multiracial categorization.

Outline

• Highlights
• Abstract
• Keywords
• 1. Experiment 1: Implicit Categorization of Multiracials
• 2. Method
• 3. Results
• 4. Discussion
• 5. Experiment 2: Free Sorting of Faces by Race
• 6. Method
• 7. Results
• 9. Interim Summary
• 8. Discussion
• 10. Experiment 3: Time Course of the Minority Bias
• 11. Method
• 12. Results
• 13. Discussion
• 14. General Discussion
• Open practices
• Appendix A. Supplementary data
• References

Read or purchase the article here.

Exposure to Biracial Faces Reduces Colorblindness

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
First published 2018-06-06
DOI: 10.1177/0146167218778012

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Negin R. Toosi, Diversity Researcher
Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Laura G. Babbitt, Researcher
Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Samuel R. Sommers, Director of the Undergraduate Program; Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Across six studies, we demonstrate that exposure to biracial individuals significantly reduces endorsement of colorblindness as a racial ideology among White individuals. Real-world exposure to biracial individuals predicts lower levels of colorblindness compared with White and Black exposure (Study 1). Brief manipulated exposure to images of biracial faces reduces colorblindness compared with exposure to White faces, Black faces, a set of diverse monoracial faces, or abstract images (Studies 2-5). In addition, these effects occur only when a biracial label is paired with the face rather than resulting from the novelty of the mixed-race faces themselves (Study 4). Finally, we show that the shift in White participants’ colorblindness attitudes is driven by social tuning, based on participants’ expectations that biracial individuals are lower in colorblindness than monoracial individuals (Studies 5-6). These studies suggest that the multiracial population’s increasing size and visibility has the potential to positively shift racial attitudes.

Read or purchase the article here.

Meghan Markle Is ‘Changing Discussions About What It Means to Be Biracial in America’

PEOPLE
2018-05-19

Breanne L. Heldman, Senior Editor

Ben Birchall/PA Wire

Meghan Markle didn’t just become the Duchess of Sussex on Saturday when she married Prince Harry in a gorgeous ceremony at St. George’s Church in Windsor Castle. She also became an important cultural icon of positive change in race relations around the world.

“The U.K. has one of the fastest-growing mixed-race populations in the world,” notes Dr. Sarah E. Gaither, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University who also runs the Duke Identity and Diversity Lab. “To the biracial community, she’s really serving as a symbol of this changing demographic that Britain is facing in addition to the United States.”

“Meghan and Harry’s marriage is really significant because the British monarchy has always been viewed as so, so white,” DaVette See, correspondent for Black Girl Nerds, tells PEOPLE. “Now, they will be seen as more a part of a multicultural world.”.

“Being a biracial American, I didn’t grow up with a lot of biracial exemplars in mainstream media or the books I read,” says Gaither, “so Meghan Markle is really an inspiration for a lot of women of color, a lot of girls of color across the United States in showing that you can help change the historical ties. You can start changing discussions about what it means to be biracial and what it means to be black in America and, now in Britain as well.”…

Read the entire article here.

I am the “Rashida Jones” version of biracial. I have white skin and dark brown, wavy hair — people always assume I’m white. Mariah Carey, who has a white mother and a black, Venezuelan father, was the only white-looking biracial person I knew of growing up. She was the biracial role model I needed, and I often thought of her when I struggled with the constant denial and questioning I faced whenever I told someone I was part black.

Sarah E. Gaither, “I study biracial identity in America. Here’s why Meghan Markle is a big deal.” Vox, May 18, 2018. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/5/14/17345162/meghan-markle-royal-wedding-2018-race.

I study biracial identity in America. Here’s why Meghan Markle is a big deal.

Vox
2018-05-14

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Duke University

Photos: Getty Images. Photo illustration: Christina Animashaun/Vox

Biracial representation is sorely needed in a country with a fraught relationship with mixed-race people.

Growing up in the late ’80s as a biracial girl, I never had a mixed-race princess whose image I could sport on my backpack or my lunchbox. There was little to no representation of my identity — almost no characters in movies or television shows, no musicians or celebrities who identified as mixed-race.

For today’s biracial youth, Meghan Markle, the actress who is marrying into the British royal family — and who has defined herself publicly as “a strong, confident mixed-race woman” — represents the biracial role model I didn’t have growing up.

My mother is white and my father is black, and as a social psychologist, I research mixed-race identity and perceptions of biracial people for a living. The history of biracial couplings and children in our country is fraught: The “one drop” rule that categorized people with any African ancestry as “colored” was legally codified in a couple of states in the early 1900s. Interracial marriage was illegal in some states starting in 1664 until 1967 with the famous Loving v. Virginia case, and it wasn’t until the year 2000 when the option to “check all that may apply” for race appeared on the census…

Read the entire article here.

She’s Biracial, And It’s Not A Secret: Meet Duke Psychologist Sarah Gaither

The State of Things
WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio
2018-02-19

Amanda Magnus, Producer

Frank Stasio, Host

Sarah Gaither is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke, and a leading researcher in the field of biracial identity. Courtesy of Sarah Gaither

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic group in the country. The U.S. Census Bureau projects the nation’s multiracial population will triple by 2060, but not much research has been done on this group. Sarah Gaither is hoping to change that. She’s an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and she is also a biracial woman.

Listen to the interview (00:47:45) here.

What You’ll Never Understand About Being Biracial

Marie Claire
2018-02-05

Brianna Moné

Courtesy from left: Samantha Ferguson, Sarah Heikkinen, Kayla Boyd

Black people don’t have freckles.”

Those were the words that reverberated through Samantha Ferguson’s middle school–aged head after telling a boy at school that she was half-black and half-white. Classmates, confused by her appearance, had been hounding her with questions like, “What are you?”

Before middle school, Ferguson didn’t think she was different from other children. But, she says, the students at her predominately-white school, “dressed a certain way, looked a certain way, their hair was straight. My skin is not dark, but it’s a different tone, which made me stand out.”

Like all middle-schoolers Ferguson had crushes and wanted to be popular. “I could never be popular, though, because I didn’t look like everyone else. Boys didn’t have crushes on me because my hair was frizzy and I had freckles.”

It was the first time she realized that people are different colors—and receive different treatment because of that. “I didn’t know if I should tell my classmates I’m white, or if I should tell them that I’m black.” She didn’t know where she fit in. She didn’t know how to identify herself.

“Identity is understanding who we are in the world,” says Kerry Ann Rockquemore, co-author of Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. “Part of that is how others understand us, and the other part is how we understand ourselves.”

For many biracial people, that understanding can be both elusive and arbitrary. From checking boxes on forms to fulfilling quotas, race is used to define and control so many aspects of everyday life. And biracial people are constantly faced with a choice…

“It really upset me. I’m a human being,” recalls Ferguson, now 24, a third-grade teacher in Glen Burnie, Maryland. “I wanted to ask them, ‘What are you?’” …

…“We have an expectation in society of what a black person should look like, or what a white person should look like,” says Sarah Gaither, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “And if you don’t look like that, that’s disruptful.”

Gaither, who is biracial, says she’s treated like a “party game:” “‘Guess what race she is. I bet you’ll never guess,’ they say. I don’t match anyone’s expectations.”…

Read the entire article here.

How do people with multiracial (or multicultural) backgrounds navigate their social identity?

who cares? what’s the point?
Season 2, Episode 6
2017-03-27

Sarb Johal, Host

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Sarah Gaither, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University in the USA. In this conversation, we focus on Sarah’s work on understanding multiracial identities and the costs and benefits of navigating that social terrain.

The paper we talk about in this week’s show is, ““Mixed” Results: Multiracial Research and Identity Explorations”.

Here is the abstract for some context:

Multiracial individuals report that the social pressure of having to “choose” one of their racial groups is a primary source of psychological conflict. Yet because of their ability to maneuver among their multiple identities, multiracials also adopt flexible cognitive strategies in dealing with their social environments—demonstrating a benefit to having multiple racial identities. The current article reviews recent research involving multiracial participants to examine the behavioral and cognitive outcomes linked to being multiracial and pinpoints possible moderators that may affect these outcomes. Limitations in applying monoracial identity frameworks to multiracial populations are also discussed…

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How Biracial Identity Affects Behavior

The State of Things
WUNC 91.5, North Carolina Public Radio
2017-03-21

Charlie Shelton, Producer

Phoebe Judge, Host/Reporter

Sarah Gaither is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University Credit Duke University

Guest host Phoebe Judge talks with psychology and neuroscience professor Sarah Gaither about biracial identity and behavior.

Sarah Gaither is interested in how growing up with multiple racial identities shapes one’s social perceptions and behaviors.

Gaither is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and her work explores how racial and gender diversity can facilitate positive relationships within different social circles…

Listen to the interview (00:17:29) here.