Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Annotated Bibliography Draft
Annotated Bibliography Draft
UWRIT 1104
21 September 2017
A Prescription for Racial Imposter Syndrome. Code Switch from NPR, 8 June 2017,
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/06/08/462395722/racial-impostor-
syndrome-here-are-your-stories
This podcast was published earlier this year on June 8 from the NPR radio show Code
Switch, which discusses race and identity. It tells the stories of those that struggle to
identify with a racial group because they are mixed race. They coined the term racial
imposter syndrome to describe this situation (RIS from now on). Included are authentic
stories from people concerning their struggle with racial identity. Throughout the
podcast, they also talk to several different experts in the field: Dr. Sarah Gaither, a
psychologist at the Identity and Diversity Lab at Duke University, Amelia Tseng, a social
linguist with the Smithsonian Institution, and Heidi Durrow, American author of The Girl
Who Fell from the Sky and founder of the Mixed Remixed Festival. These individuals,
claiming RIS themselves talk about their studies on this identity crisis. Mainly, people
suffering from RIS described feeling like an outcast, and not feeling like they deserve to
claim their racial background because they arent black enough or white enough;
whatever the case may be. This could be due to several factors, including physical
appearance and the language they speak. The idea is also brought up that there are rules
to being able to claim a racial identity as your own, however, they are ambiguous and no
one is sure what determines them. One thing is certain, all people desire to belong to a
shared group identity, and for multiracial people, finding a shared identity can be very
difficult. This subject matter is extremely relevant to my topic interest on racial identity.
It highlights important experiences that make the topic relatable and interesting. I would
like to enrich my writing with the experiences of the people that spoke in this podcast.
Grinberg, Emanuella. Multiracial Identity: Study Looks at Role of Money, Gender and
www.cnn.com/2016/01/28/living/biracial-self-identity-study-feat/index.html.
This news article, published by CNN on January 28, 2016, discusses factors that might
factors that make it difficult to identify with a racial group, as NPRs Code Switch did,
CNN discusses census data on how multiracial people choose to identify the way they do.
Studies show that by using wealth, gender and religion, you can predict which of their
races a mixed person will most identify with. However, there are also findings that more
and more people are feeling comfortable identifying as multiracial. This source takes the
subject away from the personal perspective to discuss a demographic. This source will
Song, Miri. "Generational Change and How We Conceptualize and Measure Multiracial People
and Mixture. Ethnic & Racial Studies, vol. 40, no. 13, 15 Oct. 2017, 2333-2339.
EBSCOhost.
Professor of sociology Miri Song discusses the changing multiracial demographic in her
journal article. She talks about how the ways censuses have had to adapt to include more
options for racial identification. After several generations, it is hard to determine who
how to measure that. I will use this source to connect my two previous sources by
discussing this demographic in relation to the question: who makes the rules?.
www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2013/08/biracial-identity.aspx.
about part African, part white multiracial people. Something that these individuals are
able to do is race switch where they can choose to identify with different parts of their
racial background in different situations. She also discusses the one-drop rule, a case
where these biracial individuals self-identify solely as their minority race. Similarly to
CNNs article, Swanson talks about different factors that may influence a person to
identify a certain way, adding education and a few others to the mix. Finally, she adds
she presents will flow cohesively with the information I have gathered from other
sources.