The term “diversity” describes a body of work taking place in organizational settings in the United States. Schools, businesses, nonprofits, and governmental bodies have all sponsored diversity initiatives, plans, programs and practices. Along with the worksites, a...
CSWAC Blog
building multiracial community
The Two-Dimensional Model of Racial Positioning
In a racially structured society, racial groups are assigned positions in a social hierarchy. In the United States, white people are positioned at the top in the superior position and people of color are placed below in an inferior position. Many will say that black...
The Multiracial Movement – Lessons Learned
Part 3 of a 3-part series. The multiracial movement failed to grapple with white supremacy, and many racial justice activists to this day suspect that multiracial identity is a thinly disguised strategy for people aspiring to become white. Nor is that suspicion...
Multiracial Microaggressions
Microaggressions have received a lot of study in recent years. Racial microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative” messages...
The Multiracial Movement – Retrospective Analysis
Part 2 of a 3-part series. The multiracial movement has faded now, even as the number and presence of multiracial people and families has grown. We felt we had something special to offer, standing as a rare example of people of different races living close at hand in...
When Getting-To-Know-You Works
Human beings everywhere form groups, and any given person may be a member of many different groups. Social psychologists have long studied the behavior of “ingroups” and “outgroups.” Wikipedia’s definitions are helpful here: “[A]n ingroup is a social group to which a...
The Multiracial Movement – A History
Part 1 of a 3-part series. From the early 1980s to the start of this century, there existed a publicly identified “multiracial movement” in the United States. Central to the movement were 30 grassroots support groups composed of interracial couples, transracially...
Building Multiracial Community
We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. Audre Lorde We’re observing a growing excitement among racial justice practitioners about decentering whiteness. CSWAC’s approach to decentering whiteness involves over twenty years history and...
So…What Works? What Anti-Racists Can Learn from Latin America, Part 2 of 2
So…what works? Post 2 of a 2-part series Colorblindness, liberal multiculturalism, race-mixing, and diluting monoracial identities of oppressed people are failed approaches to racial justice and equity. So, what works? What more of the Latin American experience can...
“What About Me?” Perceptions of exclusion and whites’ reactions to multiculturalism
Efforts to manage diversity and promote inclusion have become commonplace in corporations, governmental bodies, colleges and universities, and other organizational settings. Many people embrace the change, but research shows European Americans, in particular, are...
