Digital formations of racial understandings: how university websites are contributing to the ‘Two or More Races’ conversation

ABSTRACT

Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who identify with two or more racial categories. However, the 2000 Census was the first time individuals could ‘officially’ identify belonging to more than one racial category. Governmentally regulated racial naming of individuals has long been a contested issue. This tradition continues as higher education institutions have been federally mandated since 2010 to report data on individuals who self-select two or more races. In choosing how to represent these data, institutions contribute to racial projects that develop and mold understandings of the nature and meaning of ‘multiracial.’ In this article, we analyze 227 university websites to illustrate the range of ways in which this racial project is currently ongoing. Though we can only speculate about how these projects may impact future racial understandings, we capitalize on this timely moment in nationwide conceptualization.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiraciality
• racial project
• MultiCrit
• discourse
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, we use the phrase ‘individuals who self-identify as belonging to two or more races’ and the term multiracial interchangeably in reference to the population of focus in this article. Though the first is long, we feel it important to sufficiently acknowledge individuals’ right to self-naming.

2. White supremacy is a notion underlying US social stratification which ensures White people are disproportionate beneficiaries of societal power and material. This organizing principle exists outside of intentional racism (hooks 1989; Gillborn 2005, 2006).

3. The tenets that we do not use to frame our project are: experiential knowledge (centering voices of multiracial individuals); challenge to dominant ideology (lived experiences foregrounded and serve as a challenge to narrative understood as ‘normal’/dominant); racism, monoracism and colorism (not only racism, but these related oppressive structures also affect multiracial individuals); differential micro-racialization (multiracial students are racialized in varied ways for specific institutional benefit); and intersections of multiple racial identities. See Harris (2016) for a more detailed description of these tenets.

4. About 83% of mixed-race Americans identify as part White (US Census Bureau 2012).

5. We utilize the phrase ‘category quantification’ to identify the process of transforming categorical data into quantified, numerical data.

6. We make this distinction while also noting that Asian students from particular countries are actually underrepresented (Krupnick 2015) even though students from all Asian countries are aggregated into one racial category.