Support for the Ecological Framework for Understanding Multiracial Identity using Latent Profile Analysis

The current study presents a statistical model of the roles of racial identity, racial identification, and racial category under the ecological framework for understanding multiracial identity. The purposes of this study were threefold: (1) to identify distinct profiles of how multiracials understand their racial identity using latent profile analysis; (2) to investigate whether racial identification variables predicted profile membership; and (3) to examine whether profile membership differentiated multiracials across racial category and adjustment outcomes. Using a sample of 269 multiracial adults (77% female, Mage = 23.10) recruited from a southwestern university in 2018, we identified three profiles of racial identity orientations: Singular-oriented (9%; n = 23), Border-oriented (45%; n = 120), and Protean-oriented (47%; n = 126). The Singular-oriented profile was characterized by the highest level of racial distance, and the lowest levels of multiracial pride, challenges with racial identity, and creating a third space. The Border-oriented profile was characterized by the lowest level of racial distance, and the highest level of multiracial pride. The Protean-oriented profile was characterized by the highest levels of racial conflict, challenges with racial identity, and shifting racial expressions. Several racial identification variables significantly predicted profile membership, including gender, Black racial heritage, and perceived racial ambiguity. Furthermore, the three racial identity profiles predicted variation in racial typology choices, proximity to whiteness, distress, collective efficacy, and sense of belonging. These findings attest to the importance of using person-centered techniques to empirically support the ecological framework for understanding multiracial identity.

Particulate Matter Exposure across Latino Ethnicities

The Hispanic/Latino health paradox is the well-known health advantage seen across the Hispanic/Latino racial category in the US. However, this racial category collapses several distinct ethnic groups with varying spatial distributions. Certain populations, such as Dominicans and Cubans, are concentrated in specific areas, compared to more dispersed groups such as Mexicans. Historical peculiarities have brought these populations into contact with specific types of environmental exposures. This paper takes a first step towards unraveling these diverse exposure profiles by estimating how exposure to particulate matter varies across demographic groups and narrows down which types of industries and chemicals are contributing the most to air toxins. Exposure to particulate matter is estimated for 72,271 census tracts in the continental US to evaluate how these exposures correlate with the proportion of the population classified within the four largest groups that make up the Hispanic population in the US: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican. Using linear mixed models, with the state nested within US Environmental Protection Agency regulatory region, and controls for population density, we find that the Dominican population is significantly less exposed to PM2.5 and PM10 compared to non-Hispanic Whites. Moreover, those tracts with a higher proportion of Cuban residents are significantly less exposed to PM2.5. However, those tracts with a higher proportion of foreign-born, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans had significantly higher levels of exposure to all sizes of particulate matter. We discuss the need to consider the chemical components of these particles to better understand the risk of exposure to air pollution.

Woman, Non-Native, Other

This article addresses my fieldwork experiences as a Korean-American woman in Sri Lanka. In particular, it highlights the challenges I encountered around my identity, ranging from almost universal initial disbelief of my being “American” to questioning why I was studying in Sri Lanka and not South Korea. I go on to discuss how these challenges illustrate the persistence of the native/insider and non-native/outsider binary, and how, through this binary, the default racial category of the anthropologist still remains unnuanced and white.

Racial States and Re-making Race: Exploring Coloured Racial Re- and De-formation in State Laws and Forms in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The nation-state is one powerful entity that makes race. For instance, the mid-twentieth-century South African apartheid racial state cultivated a triracial hierarchy through officially naming three groups into law: White, Black (native African), and Coloured, with Coloured being defined and situated in the “racial middle” as neither White nor Black African. Yet because race is a social construction that is adaptive and dynamic, the state’s role in making race is also malleable and changing. This study offers a case study of how modern racial states re-make racial categories by focusing on the potential for re- or de-formation of the Coloured racial category since the end of apartheid in 1994 and 25 years into democracy. In conducting a critical race discourse analysis of official state forms and laws, the author finds that the post-apartheid nation-state challenges Coloureds’ racial categorization and position in the racial middle. It does this by simultaneously supporting nonracialist (i.e., color-blind racist) strategies and rewriting Coloured as Black as a means for racial redress. Moreover, the author argues that contemporary South Africa practices coloured blindness through both de-formation and then re-making of the Coloured racial category, thus contributing to the potential shift to a dichotomous racial hierarchy. This project demonstrates how the racial middle can be re-made to uphold state racial projects transformed by changes in the sociopolitical context.

White Categorical Ambiguity: Exclusion of Middle Eastern Americans From the White Racial Category

Despite legal classification as White, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans experience high levels of discrimination, suggesting low social status precludes them from accessing the White racial category. After first demonstrating that the rated Whiteness of MENA Americans influences support for discriminatory policies (Study 1), the present research explores ratings and perceptions of Whiteness of MENA Americans by demonstrating how MENA ethnicities shift racial categorization of prototypically White and racially ambiguous targets (Studies 2–4), and how MENA Americans’ social status influences rated Whiteness (Study 5). As few studies have explored the relative Whiteness of different ethnicities in the United States despite the fluid history of the White racial category, the present studies have implications for the processes that inform White categorization and lay categorizations of MENA Americans.

When Racial, Transnational, and Immigrant Identities, Literacies, and Languages Meet: Black Youth of Caribbean Origin Speak

Background/Context Immigrants are described as somewhat fixed in their geographical locations and activities in the world, having made a permanent move from their nation of origin to a new homeland. In contrast, transnational people are defined as those who live their lives across two or more nations and hold strong, multiple attachments to their nation-states. Frameworks of race are often centered in studies of the language and literacy practices of immigrant youth while transnational theories are typically prioritized in studies of transnational youths’ language and literacy practices. Research Questions/Participants This article explores extant research on the language and literacy practices and experiences of Black immigrant and Black transnational youth of Caribbean origin for whom the U.S. is a home. The purpose is to uncover similarities, differences, and nuances that may exist between the language and literacy practices and experiences of these populations. Research Design The extant research was analyzed through theoretical concepts such as micro-cultures, ethnoracial assignment and ethnoracial identity, raciolinguistics, and language and literacy as social practices. Findings Literacies prominent for both Black immigrant and Black transnational youth include reading, writing, the performing arts, and digital literacies. Analysis found that Black immigrant and Black transnational youth, through their language and literacy practices, undertake significant work in deconstructing Blackness as a monolithic racial category. The youths’ motivations for language and literacy use and transformation are conceptualized as efforts to make visible multiple ethnoracial identities and micro-cultural practices within an overarching racial category of Blackness. Analysis further found that Black immigrant and Black transnational youths’ experiences with racial, cultural, and linguistic discrimination lead many to subsume their original linguistic and literacy practices beneath the language and literacy practices of dominant ethnoracial groups in their new nations. In the case of Black transnationals, analysis found that they hold thick bonds to their countries of origin and new nations. Further, some transnationals have opportunities to spend extended time and employ their culturally influenced languages and literacies to a fuller degree in nations that hold appreciative perspectives on these repertoires. Such circumstances appear to promote Black transnationals’ abilities to continue developing and valuing their unique ethnoracial identities and ethnoculturally diverse language and literacy practices. Analysis further found that the multiple language and literacy practices of many Black immigrant youth are motivated by their longings to belong to diverse communities and connect to multicultural groups. However, these desires of youths’ were not oriented solely toward their new nation-states. Rather many Black immigrant youth actively seek out connection and consolidation of their homelands of origin and their new nations through language, literacy, and cultural practices. Analysis confirmed that this is a primary motivation for language and literacy development and use in transnational youth. Conclusion This article challenges the binary categories of immigrant and transnational using the cases of Black youth of Caribbean origin and their language and literacy practices. Its findings call for a more dynamic reconceptualization of the relationships among racial, immigrant, and transnational youth identities, literacies, and languages. Given the similarity of goals in the identity, language, and literacy practices of Black immigrant and Black transnational youth, this analysis argues that literacy research knowledge about Black immigrant youth can be enhanced by applying transnational as well as racial frameworks. Likewise, the article proposes that given the similarities of language and literacy goals, practices, and experiences, including racial and ethnic discrimination, shared by Black immigrant and Black transnational youth, future literacy research can undertake more explicit investigations of transnational youth's experiences through racial frameworks. The article suggests that knowledge of this kind can support scholars and educators in theorizing and designing educational spaces and curricula that enable all youth, notwithstanding their self- or other-assigned racial or sociopolitical categorization as native-born, immigrant, or transnational, to actualize while critically analyzing, the full range and diversity of their identities, languages, and literacies.

“White Vigilantes?”

Positive loitering is a type of neighborhood watch practice that safety activists in Rogers Park and Uptown commonly used in order to try and suppress street crime and gang activity. In conducting positive loitering, the mostly white safety activists entered a context in which their racial category was marked, because the practice encouraged charges of racism and vigilantism. This chapter describes how two positive loitering groups positioned themselves in this contested territory. It shows how the groups embraced or avoided racially contested tactics, engaged or alienated black and Latino residents, and discussed racial challenges. Ironically, a positive loitering group in Uptown created an environment of interracial collaboration in their polarized neighborhood, while the group in Rogers Park incited racial conflict despite that neighborhood’s calmer political field.