Mixed Race Studies

Harvard Professor Kimberly McClain DaCosta Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #101 – Dr. Kimberly McClain DaCosta
When: 2009-05-08, 21:00Z 

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Kimberly McClain DaCosta is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Social Studies at Harvard. Professor DaCosta received her doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program at Yale, is a recipient of a fellowship from the Advertiser’s Educational Foundation, and was a 2004-2005 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Professor DaCosta is interested in the intersections of cultural ideas of race and family and their practical effects. Her book Making Multiracials: State, Family and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford University Press) examines how multiracialism emerged as a topic of public discussion in the last quarter century, and how “multiracial” became a recognizable social category and mode of identification.

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It matters how and when you ask: self-reported race/ethnicity of incoming law students

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 15, Number 1 (January 2009)
pages 51-66

A. T. Panter
Department of Psychology
University of North Carolina

Charles E. Dayle
Department of Psychology
University of North Carolina

Walter R. Allen
Department of Psychology
University of North Carolina

Linda F. Wightman
Department of Psychology
University of North Carolina

Meera E. Deo
Department of Psychology
University of North Carolina

The high-stakes nature of law school testing and admissions puts a premium on the student data presented to admissions committees, such as essays, academic and work history, and student background characteristics including race/ethnicity. 4,472 law school-bound students self-identified their race/ethnicity using (a) a mutually exclusive “choose one” format during registration for the law school admissions test, and (b) an elaborated “check-all-that-apply” format as part of a national survey administered during the first weeks at their chosen law school. Student multiraciality that was masked by the first assessment was associated with self-reported ethnic identity, discrimination experience, intergroup contact, race-related attitudes, academic performance, and trait ratings, as compared to monoracial majority students. A different profile of findings was observed across these constructs when multiracial students were compared to monoracial majority students, to monoracial minority students, and within group. These correlates also predicted the likelihood of changing identification across the two assessment contexts. These findings support the continued study of specific combinations of multiracial groups, fluidity of multiracial identities, and context effects that influence race/ethnicity self-categorizations.