A panel discussing media coverage of multiracial and multiethnic communities was held at The Arizona Republic as part of the Republic’s tenth Diversity Dialogue.
Republic reporters Lorraine Longhi and Richard Ruelas moderated the event to address the Republic’s lack of multiracial coverage.
“Not a lot of our azcentral stories focus on the biracial and mixed race community… which begs the question, what stories are we not telling?” Longhi said in her introduction.
The panel covered topics ranging from correct terminology usage to the unique problems facing the multiracial and multiethnic communities.
Each of the six panelist also had their own personal accounts of discrimination.
Devin Del Palacio, vice president of Tolleson Unions HSD Governing Board, recounted his confusion when in elementary school he was asked to fill out a form stating his ethnicity and was only given one box to check.
Upon asking the teacher, she responded, “Don’t be silly, you’re a negro.”
Palacio’s story also highlights another problem multiracial and multiethnic communities face: many members slip through the cracks or are forced to choose between their identities to fit into a data set.
Data-heavy journalism often fails to take their demographic into account.
Several panelists, including ASU associate professors Kelly Jackson and Brandon Woo, cited the dangers of publishing “white savior” articles about trans-racial adoptive families or writing articles hailing them as a cure-all for racism.
Minimizing race isn’t a viable solution either, an angle which many of the trans-racial adoption stories took.
“These are things that we found in the research to be detrimental,” Jackson, who researches identity development and well-being in mixed-race individuals, said. “When you raise [multiracial children] to be colorblind, but they are treated differently because of the color of their skin, they have this sense of, ‘what does that mean?’”
Jackson cited a 2011 article documenting the negative effects of this notion of “colorblindness,” yet the Republic published a story promoting this same idea in 2016.
The panelists also suggested other changes for the Republic, such as asking people their preferred identifiers and only including relevant race information in articles and headlines.
Toward the end of the discussion Xena Baza, president of SIMBA, a multiracial organization at ASU, quoted a fellow multiracial student who had struck a chord with her about the multiracial identity struggle: “Being biracial, I’m not 50 percent of either, I’m 100 percent of both.”
Contact the reporter at Rebecca.Spiess@asu.edu
