{"id":41208,"date":"2015-05-24T18:38:58","date_gmt":"2015-05-24T18:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41208"},"modified":"2015-05-24T18:38:58","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T18:38:58","slug":"the-psychological-advantages-of-strongly-identifying-as-biracial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41208","title":{"rendered":"The Psychological Advantages of Strongly Identifying As Biracial"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Psychological Advantages of Strongly Identifying As Biracial<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

New York Magazine<\/a>
\n2015-05-22<\/p>\n

Lisa Miller<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

As I reported in the most recent issue of New York<\/em><\/a>, a new program at an elite private school in New York aims to combat racism by dividing young children, some as young as 8 years old, into “affinity groups” according to their race. The program has been controversial among parents, many of whom believe it is their job, and not the school’s, to impart racial identity to their kids. This feeling is particularly strong among parents who have multi-racial kids. Their identities, many of them say, don’t fit into any established racial category but instead live on the frontier of race.<\/p>\n

These sorts of questions about racial identity are only going to become more prominent given ongoing demographic changes in the United States. Multi-racial births are soaring \u2014 to 7 percent of all births in the U.S., according to the last Census \u2014 a result of more inter-racial coupling and also a broader cultural acceptance of the tag \u201cmulti-racial.\u201d (Only as recently as 2000 did the Census even offer a \u201cmulti-racial\u201d category \u2014 for hundreds of years, stigma has compelled multi-racial people to choose one or the other of their parents\u2019 racial identities, both on government forms and in society.).<\/p>\n

But even as multi-racial people take prominent and visible places in all the nation\u2019s hierarchies \u2014 golf, pop music, cinema, finance, and, of course, in the executive branch of the United States government \u2014 very little psychological research has been done on what it means to have a multi-racial identity, and how that identity is different from having a \u201cmono-racial\u201d one. Now a new literature review<\/a>, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science<\/a><\/em> by Sarah Gaither<\/a>, a post-doc at the University of Chicago (who is herself biracial), assesses the psychological landscape of multi-racial identity and points to new directions for research.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the key findings:…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Psychological Advantages of Strongly Identifying As Biracial New York Magazine 2015-05-22 Lisa Miller As I reported in the most recent issue of New York, a new program at an elite private school in New York aims to combat racism by dividing young children, some as young as 8 years old, into “affinity groups” according […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,8,20],"tags":[20113,12972,9692],"class_list":["post-41208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-lisa-miller","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-sarah-gaither"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}