Mixed Race Studies

How Policies Can Address Multiracial Stigma

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
First published 2020-10-01
pages 115-122
DOI: 10.1177/2372732220943906

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

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

Analia F. Albuja, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
Duke Identity and Diversity Lab
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Zoey Eddy, Research Assistant
Self and Social Identity Lab
University of California, Santa Barbara

Twenty years ago, Multiracial Americans completed the U.S Census with the option to indicate more than one race for the first time. As we embark on the second anniversary of this shift in Multiracial recognition, this article reviews the research related to known sources and systems that perpetuate Multiracial-specific stigma. Policy recommendations address the needs and the continued acknowledgment of this growing racial/ethnic minority population.

Key Points

• Multiracial individuals represent a growing majority in the racial/ethnic minority population
• Multiracial people encounter specific forms of stigma
• Multiracial-specific stigma uniquely impacts the psychological and physical health of Multiracial individuals
• Policies can address Multiracial-specific stigma (e.g., more detailed assessments of race/ethnicity, revisiting Multiracial language, Multiracial-specific health interventions)
• Recommended policy changes will make better use of human capital for everyone by increasing accuracy in population estimates used to distribute educational and health care resources, as well as improving health care delivery (e.g., transplant matching).

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Psychophysiological Stress Responses to Bicultural and Biracial Identity Denial

Journal of Social Issues
First published: 2019-08-14
DOI: 10.1111/josi.12347

Analia F. Albuja, Social Psychology Ph.D. Student
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

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

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

Brenda Straka, Ph.D. Student
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Rebecca Cipollina, Social Psychology Ph.D. Student
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Bicultural and biracial individuals (those who identify either with two cultures or two races) are often denied membership in the groups with which they identify, an experience referred to as identity denial. The present studies used an experimental design to test the effects of identity denial on physiological and self‐reported stress, and naturalistic behavioral responses in a controlled laboratory setting for both bicultural (Study 1; N = 126) and biracial (Study 2; N = 119) individuals. The results suggest that compared to an identity‐irrelevant denial, bicultural participants who were denied their American identity and Minority/White biracial individuals who were denied their White identity reported greater stress and were more likely to verbally reassert their identity. Bicultural participants also demonstrated slower cortisol recovery compared to those in the identity‐irrelevant denial condition. The results are the first to highlight the negative physical health consequences of identity denial using an experimental design for both bicultural and biracial populations, underscoring the necessity to promote belongingness and acceptance.

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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.

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Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save The Country

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2017-03-08

Alexandros Orphanides

What do mixed-race Americans mean for the future of racism? Roberto Westbrook/Getty Images

Americans like to fantasize that a mixed-race future will free them from the clutches of racism.

But this illusion is incompatible with an America in which the presidential election was won by the candidate who ran a “Make America Great Again” campaign, which many critics have pointed out was widely heard as a call to “Make America White Again.”

If the election results are a vindication for those championing the politics of President Trump, the demographic trends point in the opposite direction. Today, the United States’ mixed-race population is growing three times faster than the general population, and optimism about the impact that mixed-race people can have on a racially-divided country abounds.

“What Biracial People Know,” a recent op-ed in The New York Times, argues that the growing multiracial population may act as a “vaccine” to the bigotry that buoyed Trump’s campaign, granting America “immunity” to the longstanding politics of exclusion shaped by racism.

But this hope that a mixed-race future will result in a paradise of interracial and ethnically-ambiguous babies is misleading. It presents racism as passive — a vestigial reflex that will fade with the presence of interracial offspring, rather than as an active system that can change with time. A 2015 study by Pew Research Center concluded that mixed-race Americans describe experiences of discrimination in the form of slurs, poor customer service, and police encounters. These figures were highest among people of black-white and black-Native American descent…

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Study finds mixed-race individuals are fastest-growing demographic group, most discriminated against

The Daily Targum: Serving the Rutgers community since 1869. Independent since 1980.
2016-03-31

Samantha Karas

The fastest growing racial group in the United States is mixed-race individuals, but they are also the ones experiencing increasing amounts of prejudice from white people, according to a study conducted by Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor at New York University.

White individuals with lower interracial exposure tend to exhibit greater prejudice against mixed-race persons, according to the study run through NYU’s Department of Psychology.

“(These individuals) visually process racially ambiguous faces in a more difficult and unpredictable fashion, and this unstable experience translates into negative biases against mixed-race people,” Freeman said in a press release.

The study is interested in exploring attitudes towards mixed-race individuals as a function of racial exposure, said Diana Sanchez, a co-author on the study and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology…

…Laura Chapas, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said she would assume people in the Rutgers—New Brunswick area would be less biased due to the diverse population.

“What that study indicated is a shame but I’m not surprised that it’s true,” she said.

People are so quick to judge what they don’t understand, she said, and race cannot be confined to just black or white.

“I think those with lower interracial exposure may have a hard time accepting that,” Chapas said.

Dana Campbell, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said she was not surprised with the findings of the study.

“I agree (with the conclusion). I think that when people who aren’t exposed to other races only see those races as the media portrays them,” Campbell said. “Without any personal experience people have to rely on movies, books, the new, etc. to try to understand race.”

People can confront their own biases by understanding the sources of bias, she said…

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Where We Live Affects Our Bias Against Mixed-Race Individuals, Psychology Study Finds

NYU News
New York University
2016-03-14

Press Contact: James Devitt | (212) 998-6808

Whites living in areas where they are less exposed to those of other races have a harder time categorizing mixed-race individuals than do Whites with greater interracial exposure, a condition that is associated with greater prejudice against mixed-race individuals, a new experimental study shows.

For decades, research has shown that Whites with lower interracial exposure show greater prejudice against Blacks, but the new study finds they also show a greater prejudice against mixed-race individuals—the fastest growing racial group in the United States.

“Our findings show that White individuals with lower interracial exposure tend to exhibit greater prejudice against mixed-race individuals,” explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the study’s lead author. “The results suggest that this bias arises in individuals with lower interracial exposure because they visually process racially ambiguous faces in a more difficult and unpredictable fashion, and this unstable experience translates into negative biases against mixed-race people.”

A video outlining the research may be viewed here.

The study’s other authors included Kristin Pauker, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Diana Sanchez, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University.

The research, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, considered two national samples totaling approximately 350 subjects. It determined subjects’ interracial exposure by matching Census data with their zip codes. To gauge subjects’ responses, the researchers relied on an innovative mouse-tracking technique that uses an individual’s hand movements to reveal unconscious cognitive processes. Unlike surveys, in which individuals can consciously alter their responses, this technique requires respondents to make split-second decisions about others where an unconscious—and more honest—preference can be uncovered through their hand-motion trajectory…

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The Brain Likes Categories. Where Should It Put Mixed-Race People?

Shots: Health News from NPR
National Public Radio
2016-03-15

Katherine Du

Humans like to place things in categories and can struggle when things can’t easily be categorized. That also applies to people, a study finds, and the brain’s visual biases may play a role in perceptions of mixed-race people.

The study, published in Psychological Science on Monday, asked people to sort images of people as either white or black, but it included multiracial faces in the mix, too. There has been much less research into attitudes about mixed-race people, even though they are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States.

The 235 study participants, who all self-identified as white, signed up through the online survey site Mechanical Turk and provided their ZIP codes. The researchers then used U.S. Census data to determine their level of exposure to other racial groups…

…”Where you live influences how easily you process biracial faces which may, without your awareness, be affecting your attitudes toward them,” according to Diana Sanchez, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers and an author of the study…

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A Perceptual Pathway to Bias: Interracial Exposure Reduces Abrupt Shifts in Real-Time Race Perception That Predict Mixed-Race Bias

Psychological Science
Volume 27, Issue 4, 2016
pages 502–517
DOI: 10.1177/0956797615627418

Jonathan B. Freeman, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

Kristin Pauker, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii, Manoa

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

In two national samples, we examined the influence of interracial exposure in one’s local environment on the dynamic process underlying race perception and its evaluative consequences. Using a mouse-tracking paradigm, we found in Study 1 that White individuals with low interracial exposure exhibited a unique effect of abrupt, unstable White-Black category shifting during real-time perception of mixed-race faces, consistent with predictions from a neural-dynamic model of social categorization and computational simulations. In Study 2, this shifting effect was replicated and shown to predict a trust bias against mixed-race individuals and to mediate the effect of low interracial exposure on that trust bias. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that interracial exposure shapes the dynamics through which racial categories activate and resolve during real-time perceptions, and these initial perceptual dynamics, in turn, may help drive evaluative biases against mixed-race individuals. Thus, lower-level perceptual aspects of encounters with racial ambiguity may serve as a foundation for mixed-race prejudice.

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Exposure to Racial Ambiguity Influences Lay Theories of Race

Social Psychological and Personality Science
Volume 6, Number 4 (May 2015)
pages 382-390
DOI: 10.1177/1948550614562844

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

Danielle M. Young
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Kristin Pauker, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Biological lay theories of race have proven to have pernicious consequences for interracial relations, yet few studies have examined how intergroup contact itself (particularly with those who naturalistically challenge these conceptions) affects beliefs about race. Three studies (a correlational study, an interaction study, and an experimental study) examine whether exposure to racially ambiguous individuals reduces Whites’ biological lay theories of race across time. Study 1 demonstrates that increased exposure to racial ambiguity across 2 weeks reduced White individuals’ biological lay theories. Study 2 shows that Whites who interacted in a laboratory setting with a racially ambiguous individual were less likely to endorse biological lay theories, an effect that sustained for 2 weeks. Study 3 finds that the reduction in biological lay theories after exposure to racial ambiguity is mediated by the tendency for Whites’ lay theories of race to conform to beliefs they presume racially ambiguous individuals hold.

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Thinking Outside the Box: Multiple Identity Mind-Sets Affect Creative Problem Solving

Social Psychological and Personality Science
Published online before print: 2015-01-27
DOI: 10.1177/1948550614568866

Sarah E. Gaither, Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Jessica D. Remedios, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

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

Samuel R. Sommers, Associate Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Rigid thinking is associated with less creativity, suggesting that priming a flexible mind-set should boost creative thought. In three studies, we investigate whether priming multiple social identities predicts more creativity in domains unrelated to social identity. Study 1 asked monoracial and multiracial participants to write about their racial identities before assessing creativity. Priming a multiracial’s racial identity led to greater creativity compared to a no-prime control. Priming a monoracial’s racial identity did not affect creativity. Study 2 showed that reminding monoracials that they, too, have multiple identities increased creativity. Study 3 replicated this effect and demonstrated that priming a multiracial identity for monoracials did not affect creativity. These results are the first to investigate the association between flexible identities and flexible thinking, highlighting the potential for identity versatility to predict cognitive differences between individuals who have singular versus multifaceted views of their social selves.

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