Many different external factors shape Asian American identity. However, the effect of political elections on racial, ethnic, and national identities has been understudied. This research explores whether political elections represent moments of exogenous shock that can shape the importance of three different dimensions of identities for Asian Americans. This study uses data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey (n = 3,643) to test for a relationship between the racialized rhetoric surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the aforementioned aspects of Asian American identity. Regression analyses suggest that the election shaped patterns of centrality of racial, national and ethnic identity among Asian Americans, albeit differently across ethnic groups. Specifically, American identity centrality increased for Chinese respondents post-election relative to pre-election, but did not shift significantly for any other group. On the other hand, racial identity centrality significantly decreased for Filipino and Vietnamese respondents post-election, while other groups did not experience a significant change in their racial identity centrality. Finally, ethnic identity centrality only decreased significantly among Korean respondents post-election. This research suggests that these identities among Asian Americans are sensitive to external events, such as political elections, and that the effects of racialized political rhetoric vary across ethnicity.

Multiracial organizing since the 1980s has centered around the need to define and make visible the term multiracial (e.g., U.S. Census). In the contemporary era when multiple race populations are a growing and institutionally recognized demographic, how do multiracial organizations characterize and seek to combat collective experiences of racial marginalization? Here, we draw on in-depth interviews with officers from diverse multiracial organizations in the U.S. and Canada (N = 19) collected from 2017 through 2018 to examine this question. The findings revealed that multiracial individuals experience distinct forms of exclusion, which we call categorical invisibility, that target individuals who do not “fit” into established monoracial categories, and mixture as pathology, a less common frame but representing more overt forms of bias targeting those of mixed backgrounds. The lived impacts of these experiences prompt the expressed need for “safe” spaces from the psychosocial costs of categorical invisibility. Multiracial organizations, located mostly in the United States with one in Canada, engage in diverse community building and advocacy efforts to address these needs and, thus, represent critical sites of resistance to the trauma of racial (in)visibility. This work amplifies the need to center Critical Multiracial Theory to expose how monoracial paradigms as a central feature of White supremacy continue to shape the lives of multiracial people and expand our knowledge on how multiracial organizations shape the (re)negotiation of racial categories that challenge the racial status quo.

Special issue in Sociologial Inquiry on “The Cultural and the Racial: Stitching Together the Sociologies of Race/Racism/Ethnicity and Culture.”

The durability of racism in the United States continues to inspire critical scholarship about the mechanisms that drive persisting inequalities. Drawing on theories of colorblindness and white ignorance, growing work examines how White people actively deny, revise, or mystify white supremacy, illuminating cultural mechanisms that (re)produce racialized structures. Largely absent from this body of work, however, is the potential role of religion—specifically Christianity—as a cultural system that can inform and legitimize ways of knowing (or not knowing) about racism. Here, we draw on 85 interviews with White Christians (Catholic, Mainline Protestant, and Evangelical Protestant) to analyze how they talk about racism and produce racial knowledge. We show how some White Christians draw on colorblind religious frames and religious frames of diversity and inclusion to inform and legitimize overlapping, sometimes contradictory racial logics that can be deployed across social contexts to produce ignorance about systemic racism. Findings reveal the production of colorblindness as a dynamic process that, under certain conditions, White Christians actively negotiate by using religious frames, producing what we describe as divinized colorblindness.

Racially mixed children are a rapidly expanding segment of American families, signaling the ongoing blurring of racial boundaries. Most of what is known about multiraciality is drawn from analyses of two-parent families even as marriage became decreasingly tied to childbearing. The current study tracked the prevalence and racial composition of multiracial families where parents are married and unmarried from 1980 until 2018 using data from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. We find that multiracial families are increasingly common amongst married and unmarried parents with the greatest growth occurring among White unmarried mothers, nearly 15% of whom have multiracial children as of 2018. Additionally, we find that Asian-White and Hispanic-White children are more likely to live in married families while Black-White and dual minority children are disproportionately represented amongst single-parent families. Ultimately, capturing the complexity of racialized contexts where multiracial children are found, as well as how the prevalence of these contexts has changed over time, requires accounting for family structure differences.