Multiracial people comprise the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country. From childhood, multiracial people must navigate racialized structures that were created to accommodate people with exactly one ethnic-racial identity (ERI; youths’ understanding of their ethnic/racial backgrounds). Because multiracial youth do not fit neatly into these socially constructed racial categories, they may become simultaneously aware of their racial identity and racist structures as they grow up in a monoracist society and have a unique motivation to disrupt them. However, little research examines how multiracial youth come to understand both who they are and systemic oppression concurrently. Thus, we aim to create a scale that measures Critical Multiracial Ethnic-Racial Identity (CMERI).

Our work is strongly grounded in critical multiracial theory (MultiCrit). MultiCrit disrupts dominant monoracial paradigms and centers the experiences of multiracial students to reveal racist structures and enact social justice (Harris, 2016). With this framing, our work hopes to address the paucity of literature analyzing ethnic-racial identity exploration (i.e., seeking to understand its meaning in one’s life) and salience (i.e., one’s sense of its situational significance) for multiracial people as they navigate a monoracist world privileging those that identify with a single ethnic-racial category (Rivas-Drake et al., 2014; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014). In this work we are also interested in understanding how CMERI is related to multiracial youths’ development of critical consciousness (CC; their capacity to reflect on racialized oppression and motivation to take action; Diemer et. al, 2020). With this theoretical grounding we ask the following questions.

How can we assess CMERI in a reliable and valid way? 

How are CMERI and critical consciousness development related?