Research

Racial Health Inequities

Initially arising out of writing on the Covid-19 pandemic, my emergent focus is on promoting understandings of institutional change and structural racism for remedying health inequities. An example of this thread of work can be found in my Perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine from summer 2021. In addition, my article on “Moving Beyond Mistrust: Centering Institutional Change by Decentering the White Analytical Lens” is currently under peer review.

Gamete Donor Selection

My postdoctoral project, Racial Mixing and Matching: The Gamete Donor Selection Process for Mixed Race Intended Parents and Interracial Couples, uses gamete donation as a site to investigate how ideas about race, culture, genetics, and connection to family background inform mixed race parents and interracial couples during the gamete donor selection process. The widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies, coupled with processes of demographic and social change, are contributing to the normalization of new family configurations that extend beyond biological kinship. Non-traditional families, increasingly prevalent due to interracial and same-sex marriages, challenge normative expectations of family resemblance between siblings, parents, and children. This study seeks to identify the sensibilities about race, heritability, kinship, and genetics that influence reproductive decisions.

Multiracial Collective Identity

Following the partial institutionalization of multiraciality, ushered in by the change to the 2000 Census allowing for multiracial identification, the question of if and how the multiracial population develops a shared
identity has been largely unexplored. While there is a growing literature on multiraciality, most studies focus on only a few select subsets of the population, particularly those that are part-white. In my dissertation and current book project, I identify the boundaries around the emergence of the multiracial category, the privileges that circulate with multiracial identification, and the role of local context in shaping the types of connections, networks, and expressions of multiracial collectivity that individuals develop. This research interrupts celebratory notions of multiraciality that marshal the existence of mixed race people as evidence of the declining salience of race, using the heterogeneity and diversity of the population to revisit theoretical frameworks for understanding collective identity within a new and unexplored context.

In addition to chapters appearing in a volume on racial “shape shifters” and an edited collection on adolescent racial identity, my peer-reviewed journal article “Desiring the Standard Light Skin: Black Multiracial Boys, Masculinity, and Exotification” received the 2017 Paul Spickard Graduate Student Paper Award from the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association and was a 2018 recipient of the Loren Frankel Memorial Scholarship from the American Men’s Studies Association.

Multiraciality, Intermarriage, and Assimilation

While intermarriage and multiracial identity are frequently interpreted as markers of assimilation, a large disconnect exists between the fields of immigration and mixed race studies. I seek to bridge the theoretical gap between the two areas of scholarship by drawing upon both traditions to study first- and second-generation multiracial immigrants. I find that for the multiracial children of immigrants, asserting a mixed race identity is a mechanism for claiming connection and belonging to multiple ethnoracial groups, rather than be rendered marginalized, distant, or partial with respect to their immigrant heritage(s).