Bearing the burden of whiteness: the implications of racial self-identification for multiracial adolescents' school belonging and academic achievement

Abstract

Previous literature on racial self-identification among multiracials demonstrates that self-identification differs by context. Moreover, among multiracial adolescents, identity, usually measured in school, is correlated with achievement. In addition, a few studies have indicated that for half-white, half-minority adolescents, school achievement falls in between the achievements of their monoracial counterparts. Using the in-school and in-home components of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the relationship between racial self-identification and school belonging and achievement. We find that among black/white and Asian/white adolescents, adolescents who self-identify as white are particularly disadvantaged in school, reporting lower grade point averages (GPA) than their multiracial counterparts. Our conclusions suggest that multiple contextual measures of self-identification better capture the relationship between racial identification and academic achievement among multiracial adolescents.

Keywords:

• Adolescence
• multiracial
• multiraciality
• racial identity
• academic performance
• identity

Acknowledgements

This research uses data from Add Health, a programme project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from twenty-three other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgement is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Notes

1. It is the convention for research on multiracials to treat as multiracial all adolescents who self-identify with two (or more) races or who self-identify with different single races in different contexts (e.g. they are ‘black’ at home but ‘white’ in school).

2. Although Native American/white adolescents are numerically the largest group of multiracial adolescents in the Add Health data, they are not included in this study. Because of the high level of racial heterogeneity in this population as well as the increasing popularity of identifying as Native American, the authenticity of ‘Native American’ as a racial identity is hard to determine, particularly since Add Health did not ask for tribal identification (Nagel 1995; Snipp 2002).

3. Hispanic adolescents are not included in this study because of the conflation of ‘Hispanic’ as both a racial and ethnic label among this population (Vaquera and Kao 2006)

4. Our definition of ‘multiracial’ as any adolescent who identifies with two or more races or with two different single race groups is consistent with the literature on multiracial adolescents (Harris 2002; Harris and Thomas 2002).

5. Details on this process available upon request.