Biracial Identity

Biracial identity or multiracial identity refers to the social, cultural, political, and psychological accomplishment or construction of a sense of identity among those individuals who straddle existing (or historical) racial formations. To investigate biracial or multiracial identity is to seek to understand the strategies, negotiations, and self-understandings of multiracial people and the factors involved in the construction of a racial identity. Researchers have focused on a variety of different groups and racial combinations under the overarching conceptual terms biracial and multiracial —as such, generalizations and comparisons across studies are extremely difficult to make. Due to the deep entrenchment of the White/Black divide in the United States, the vast majority of American studies have focused on identity patterns among the offspring of self-identified Black and self-identified White parents. The first decade of the 21st century represents the fourth decade of concerted scholarly attention to multiracial and biracial identity formation.

Since the late 1970s, research on the racial identity of Black/White biracials has suggested that there exist two possibilities for these individuals’ racial self-understandings: Black or biracial. Early scholarship appears to have been based less on the results of empirical research and more on the historical and cultural norm of the “one drop rule” as the underlying assumption. This “rule” mandated that biracial offspring adopt a Black racial identity. Most researchers on racial identity in the 1970s and early 1980s were interested in understanding how these individuals developed a Black identity.

By the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, the extant pathologies associated with biracial individuals’ marginality drew the attention of a new generation of researchers, who sought to explain psychologically, clinically, and developmentally how these individuals developed a biracial identity and how they could maintain a healthy, integrated sense of their biraciality. These studies incorporated findings and discussions about the racial self-understandings of biracials from earlier research and continued the development of a dichotomous typology of racial identity possibilities for biracials: Black and biracial—this time [Page 64]with an overt preference for the development of a biracial identity. Such research set the parameters, within the scholarship, of the possibilities for racial identity among biracial people.

The 1990s brought yet another generation of scholars interested in the lives of multiracial people. These investigators used new analytical tools and incorporated interdisciplinary approaches. The work of several authors from this group began to illuminate for us that multiracial people had multiple understandings of their racial identities. F. James Davis challenged us to consider the question “Who is Black?” Maria Root convinced us that these individuals had different negotiations and answers to the question of how to resolve the status of the “other.” This new work has set the tone for research on multiracial and biracial individuals. Root's work, however, represents the methodological limitations of the existing research (i.e., the exclusive use of clinical studies and small self-selective samples) while replicating the unidirectional, atheoretical, and ideologically biased work of the 1980s. Kerry Ann Rockquemore presents a comprehensive typology that integrates the voices of biracial individuals with a variety of classic and contemporary identity theories. She suggests that there are four types of racial identity options for biracial people, including a singular identity (singular Black or White), a border identity (exclusively biracial), a protean identity (sometimes Black, sometimes White, sometimes biracial), and a transcendent identity (no racial identity).

...