Updating Models of Racial and Ethnic Identity 503Models of ethnic and racial identity, with few exceptions,
have assumed the confabulation of race constructed by scien-
tists and government—that there is such a thing as purity,
much less race! Essentially race-specific trauma models, they
suggest that one starts out innocently believing in a “just
world” and learns by a significant experience that there is
gross injustice, particularly when it comes to the caste status
for persons with phenotypes that are not solely European in
origin.
None of the leading theorists of ethnic or racial identity
actually believes in the purity of race, but the models inad-
vertently reinforce this. Common across models is a stage of
retreat to the community of origin as a place within which
healing from socially and politically induced racial trauma
begins. Through immersion in the race and/or ethnic group,
one theoretically develops a sense of pride that will inoculate
one against the injustices that do exist.
These models assume that by virtue of your parentage and
phenotype, you will be embraced, mentored, and empow-
ered. These models theoretically make sense, and in the era
they were produced—the end of the civil rights era or the
third quarter of the twentieth century—they worked for most
of the people deemed visible minorities. However, they per-
petuated the invisibility and marginality of persons of mixed
heritage who were not conceived from rape, slavery, or war.
Inadvertently, many of them historically have become the
oppressors of mixed heritage persons who do not conform to
rules of hypodescent (i.e., assignment to the group, and only
one group, of the lowest social status).
Notwithstanding admiring these works and the people
who have produced them, I also noticed that my experience
and many of my friends’ experience did not fit. Born in
the Korean War era in the Philippines of a Filipino mother
and a white American father, this complexity of juxtaposi-
tions (ethnicity, race, nationality, colonialism, gender, and
class) allowed me an outsider vantage from which to examine
the models that have been so foundational to some of the
work on racial and ethnic identity. For many of us who are
of mixed race, even in communities to which our families
belonged or were assigned, we were intruders or suspected as
potential betrayers of “the race.” To belong, we had less room
in which to express our individuality or the unique way in
which blending influenced us. Thus, we did not have guaran-
teed refuge in the minority group of origin unless we hid part
of ourselves or even engaged in denigration of part of our
family.
For those with Asian mothers of a different nationality, we
were culture brokers yet sometimes teased within Asian
American groups for acting in foreign or odd ways. In this
way, nation, race, and ethnicity were terribly confused. For
persons of African descent combined with any other heritage,
declaring multiple allegiances or a blended identity was in-
terpreted as confusion or a desire to divest oneself of black-
ness. Being tested by any of our groups of origin, we were
always put to more severe scrutiny or authenticity testing,
and seldom considered full and true members. In effect, the
oppressed joined ranks with the oppressors and inadvertently
served the agenda of advancing a fiction of social purity and
segregation of the races—the very system harmful to our
ancestors.
Several classic dissertations were completed in the 1980s
and formed the core for the contemporary theory and work on
what constitutes normative experience and development for
persons of mixed heritage. These dissertations largely came
out of the discipline of psychology and were groundbreaking
works of scholarship and data production (e.g., C. I. Hall,
1980; Jacobs, 1977; Murphy-Shigematsu, 1986; Thornton,
1983). They were difficult to accomplish because of the lack
of literature on the topic, the lack of random distribution
of mixed race people in the population, the few numbers of
persons identified as mixed race, and the methods required
to gain large enough samples for analysis. What changed
within a decade of the youngest of these dissertations was the
interdisciplinary interest in mixed race identity production
and meaning. There were suddenly more young scholars of
mixed heritage and the foundation had been laid in the first
of two books I edited to make these pieces of research and
others available (Root, 1992, 1996b).
My initial work on mixed race identity undertook a
departure from stage models, as many of the previous re-
searchers had done. I proposed four different types of identi-
ties that persons of mixed heritage may express at different
times in their life: (a) identify as a single race according to
rules of hypodescent; (b) identify as a single race for personal
and or political congruence; (c) identify as multiple races; or
(d) identify as a new race. Rather than being proposed as aUpdating Models of Racial and Ethnic Identity:
On the Origins of an Ecological Framework of Identity DevelopmentMARIA P. P. ROOT