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...
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Like Me, or Respect Me: When Race Makes a Difference
How we appear to others is a pressing matter for most people. We are social beings, and how well we fit with our social partners often determines how well we can lead satisfactory lives and achieve our goals. Prior research has shown that we form impressions about one...
Multicultural versus Multiracial: What’s the Difference?
The term “multicultural” is commonplace. Google identifies 81 million references. The term “multiracial” while not rare, is less common, yielding 14 million Google hits. For those engaged in matters of racial justice and racial equity, it’s helpful to consider the...
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...
Lifting Up Color Consciousness
A color conscious ideology holds that our society is structured by race in a way that benefits white people at the expense of people of color, and awareness of this fact is necessary to build a more equitable arrangement. Color consciousness is one of the “big three”...
