Presenter: Aïsha Lehmann
Authors: Aïsha Lehmann
Faculty Advisor: Fidalis Buehler
Institution: Brigham Young University
Multiracial individuals make up 6.9% of the U.S. population and are one of the fastest growing demographics—three times the rate of the general population. Some have argued that increasing numbers of multiracial and multiethnic people is proof of a post-racial society. Unfortunately, race continues to be a salient determinate of a persons’ educational, economic, residential, and health outcomes in life. While mixed individuals themselves cannot simply “fix” racial inequality, researching mixed persons’ positions in society indicates a great deal about the evolving color divide. Studies indicate that mixed persons with one White parent tend to reside just behind monoracial White people socioeconomically, but ahead of their monoracial minority counterparts, demonstrating a persistent system that privileges proximity to White European parentage and phenotype. Unfortunately, research focusing solely on racial disparities overlooks how race—initially intended as a discriminatory tactic—has since also developed communities of kinship, unifying those with common ancestry, physical features, and cultures. Critical Race Theory offers the “counter story” perspective, asserting that the personal narratives of people of color are essential for race research and inquiry, as they are the experts of their own life experiences. Furthermore, race terminology is often limiting and does not adequately articulate the complexities, nuance, and fluidity of mixed identity. In this way, a visualportrayal of a person’s experience with mixedness is far more befitting a medium than confining sociological vocabulary. This project hyper-focuses on the individual through a series of interviews with people of mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity that were then translated into life-size high-detail portraits, utilizing pattern and motif to reflect their personal and singular experience as a mixed-race person in Utah. It reasserts the authority of a person of color to tell their own story and affirm their identity on their own terms.