When Racial Identity and Racial Identification Misalign: A Tale of Two Black Biracial Women

• In Event: Multiracial Identification and Identities

Abstract

What is it like being the only non-white students in a class? How does this change if the only two students both identify as Black, biracial women? This study provides insights into two Black biracial women’s racial identification of self and one another over time as they navigated a predominantly White institution as classmates. I use intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) and the recognizing the heterogeneity within each race (Celious & Oyserman, 2001) to explore the intra and intergroup differences influenced by individual and collective racial identities and racial identifications (Rockquemore et al., 2009). Although the participants recognized they shared a similar outsider racialized status, their ethnicized experiences were not the same, leading to differences in their racial identification of one another.

Author

• Brittany Smotherson, University of Missouri