Intent vs. Impact: Creating Space for Multiraciality in Higher Education

As I approached my second workiversary with Student-Ready Strategies, I was reflecting on impact and gaps in the work. One instance that lives in my head rent-free is a conversation at a policy workshop. A participant named that multiracial individuals were missing from the student populations listed on the screen. As a multiracial Latina, I felt like a stone was sinking in my gut. It was such an obvious oversight. However, I realized at that moment how easy it is to miss something when said entity is literally engrained into your daily life, and informs how you see the world. 

Student populations continue to diversify across social identities, especially race. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the multiracial population in the United States went from roughly 9 million to 33 million. While more research on multiracial students has debuted in the last decade, this ever growing population can sometimes be forgotten in the field. Even less research exists on multiracial faculty and administrators. During my time as a student and a professional, I often felt like I was expected to exist across multiple worlds. 

With that said, I am a firm believer in helping to create the world that I want to live in. In order to do just that, I have compiled an action list to be more inclusive of multiracial individuals across the higher education ecosystem. 

1. Create identity initiatives for multiracial students. Multiracial students often feel like they have to choose between their identities when participating in racial competency initiatives. Providing a clear path for this population allows their multiple identities to be validated, and also allows for a deeper learning experience.

   
   

2. Decentralize whiteness and the racial binary in racial justice education. When myriad folks think about multiracial identity, they often picture an individual with a white parent. However, that image is a very limited representation of multiraciality, and further perpetuates the idea of the racial binary in the United States. White racial concepts should not be the default focus of racial justice education, especially for multiracial students.

   
   

3. Avoid treating the multiracial experience as a monolith and acknowledge the breadth of experiences. While commonalities can exist across multiracial students, there is no “one” path to multiracial identity development. Factors like phenotype, family relationships, and geographic location are just some of the entities that can impact how mulitracial students move through the world. Multiracial students nor multiracial professionals should be boxed into generalized norms or stereotypes.

   
   

4. Provide resources for multiracial students’ support networks to assist with healthy identity development. Multiracial students can feel like they have to constantly explain their identity nuances to their monoracial support networks. Higher education institutions should assist said support networks in understanding their students’ journeys.

While it didn’t feel great in the moment to realize that I had unintentionally left out a group that I belong to, I very much appreciate that someone took the time to name it in that space. The naming allowed me to recognize an area of growth that I can now focus on as I continue to advocate for student-centered systemic change in higher education.