Mixed Race Studies

Essentializing Ethnicity: Identification Constraint Reduces Diversity Interest

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Available online: 2014-07-10
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2014.07.001

Tiane L. Lee
University of Maryland, College Park

Leigh S. Wilton
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Virginia S.Y. Kwan, Associate Professor of Psychology
Arizona State University

Highlights

• We primed essentialism with instruction to “Check One”, rather than “Check All”, ethnicities.
• Minorities reduced diversity engagement, distancing from activities that express background.
• Essentialist European-Americans showed less interest in intergroup friendship.
• Interaction with chronic essentialist beliefs replicated in a non-race-related context.

The present research investigates the effects of a subtle essentialist cue: restricting individuals to identify with only one ethnicity. Although this constraint is mundane and commonly used in everyday life, it sends a message of essentialized group differences. Three studies illustrate the harmful impact of this essentialist cue on diversity. Studies 1a and 1b show that it decreases Asian-Americans’ desire to participate in ethnicity-related activities. Study 2 reveals that it reduces essentialist European-Americans’ desire for friendship with a minority target. Study 3 illustrates the mechanism through which an essentialist cue reduces intergroup contact, with perceivers’ chronic beliefs moderating this effect. Together, these findings demonstrate the powerful impact of the seemingly small act of how we ask people to identify with an ethnic group.

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ARC Introduces Tiana Reid as Junior Arts Writer

ARC: Art. Recognition. Culture.
2014-02-03

Tiana Reid

I laboured for quite some time over what to write as my introduction to joining ARC Magazine’s team as Junior Arts Writer. How to approach the unstarted?

I was thinking first of preparing a brief manifesto-like document. That was one approach that could explicate the nuts and bolts of how I see the world. And in a few paragraphs or less! Perhaps, drawing on the words of Singapore artist Heman Chong and Sweden-based artist Anthony Marcellini’s 2013 video collaboration, I would mock up plots for things to come.

Another approach would be a biography. You know, “I was born in Toronto. I went to school at McGill. I have my M.A. in African-American Studies at Columbia. I live in Brooklyn.” I would likely pause on my non-art history background and explore my academic interest in visual culture against my permanent and affected interest as a writer in reading and speculation. When it comes to the former, my master’s thesis illuminated the shared yet dissimilar aesthetic practices of poet Natasha Trethewey and conceptual artist Adrian Piper. My thesis used ‘mixed-race’ studies as a vexed entryway to trouble claims to a speculative hybrid future, and argued that the desire and alleged ability to see a mythical (post)-racially hybrid body is intimately connected to the disavowal of black life and histories of violence…

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The racist face of Brazil’s miscegenation

Black Women of Brazil: The site dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent
2013-05-22

Jarid Arraes
Cariri, Ceará, Brasil

The issue of miscegenation in Brazil is often oversimplified and romanticized. It is not uncommon to hear that Brazil is a mestiço (mixed race) and plural country and, consequently, all its inhabitants had their ethnicity inevitably mixed at some point in their ancestry. But under the axiom of a mixed country hides a violent and racist reality: the generalization of whiteness in a predominantly black country.

If all Brazilians are mixed and have black and Indian blood in their veins, why are many people reluctant to recognize their own ancestry?…

Read the entire article here.