Let's Get Down to Business

"Oh, just gather all the references about racial socialization and stick them in the Dropbox." Easy, right? If by "easy" you mean searching through multiple databases to download and cite pdfs of every  single publication about racial, ethnic, and cultural socialization and sorting them by race, then yes. This week was very easy.

I had heard about the tremendous amount of reading required before and while designing a research project. And now, I've finally experienced it firsthand. Although my eyes water from staring at never-ending blocks of text, my brain is enjoying all the new information for the most part. Especially stories of how people of different races experience and cope with racial stereotypes.

On Thursday, our class watched First Person Plural, a documentary following a Korean American transracial adoptee. As a young child, Kang Okjin (renamed Deann Borshay) was adopted by a White family in California. When she spoke about her internal conflicts due to both subtle and obvious racial discrimination, I completely sympathized with her. What really interested me, however, wasn't our shared experiences, but rather Borshay's accounts of learning to accept parents who looked different from her. In the documentary, Borshay explains her sense of outcast because everyone else in her family—her mother, father, brother, and sister—had light hair and blue eyes. I can't imagine how I would feel if my family looked different from me.

Deann Borshay with her adoptive brother and sister.

When Borshay came into contact with her Korean mother, she faced yet another conflict: the existence of two mothers. Borshay states that she immediately felt like she belonged when she met her biological mother, who looked exactly like her. But, her biological mother wasn't the one who sent her to school, celebrated her birthdays, took care of her when she was sick. For a long time, Borshay struggled over who to call "mom" and eventually decided to get to know her biological mother as a person, not a mom.

Borshay's story really opened my eyes to another group of people to possibly include in my research project.While collecting references for our project, I noticed that barely any research papers have been published on the experiences of multiracial people and transracial adoptees (and trust me, I've read through a lot of publications). Although we currently don't plan on collecting data from multiracial students, I would definitely be interested in examining any trends if we end up with a reasonable pool of multiracial participants.

My research project so far doesn't follow my proposal exactly, but I think that's the fun of it. As of this week, I'll be contributing to a literature review on racial socialization to precede the collection and analysis of data. Also, I never mentioned in my proposal that I would learn how the ASU library system works or find the best study nooks at ASU, like the balcony of the Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4 (Did I mention that a friend and I accidentally locked ourselves out on the balcony?). Who knows where the next eight weeks will take me? I guess you'll just have to keep reading to find out.

A Lamb in Sheep's Clothing

Panting from multiple flights of the wrong stairs, I slowly walked into the room. The room was naturally lit with windows lining the top of the left and right walls; the rectangular desks were long enough for three people to sit comfortably. Because I come from a high school with the size and layout of a dentist's office, everything was unfamiliar: from the sheer number of buildings to the shared desks.

But, I couldn't dwell on the unfamiliarity of my physical surroundings. I had to find a seat. Most of the students—whom I later discovered were a mixture of sophomores and juniors—sat in pairs with people they already seemed to know. Towards the front of the room was a desk with one person and two empty seats. Not wanting to sit completely alone, I took one of them.

Then came the scariest part: introducing myself to the random student I chose to sit next to. I was nervous that I would be treated differently as a lamb in sheep's clothing, a high school student pretending to be a college student. However,the sophomore I sat next to turned out to be completely welcoming and talked to me like I was an ASU student. He even kindly offered to send me the lecture notes I missed because I couldn't miss two days of my high school in a week to attend class at ASU.

To supplement my internship with Dr. Brandon Yoo, I am currently auditing one of his classes, Asian Pacific American Psychology. Five weeks into the class, I've become much more comfortable with the college environment. Fortunately, the structure of the class isn't too different from that of my high school classes. The only major change is that I only attend class twice a week, as opposed to every day. 

Besides attending Asian Pacific American Psychology, I've been helping Dr. Yoo narrow down the main research question and compile survey questions. At the moment, we are focusing on three factors that may influence mental health in terms of race: perceived racism, internalized racism, and racial socialization. 

Perceived racism is an individual's experience of racial discrimination, such as being called "chink." On the other hand, internalized racism is an individual's adoption of racial stereotypes, exemplified by Asians who get double-eyelid surgery to make their eyes look bigger, more Western. Internalized racism is hypothesized to be influenced by racial socialization, the methods by which individuals are exposed to the concept and treatment of race. For example, some parents teach their children about different races and the equality of humans regardless of race. Sorting through previous studies and measures about racial discrimination and its origins, I will be creating a mass table of measures for internalized racism and racial socialization for the next week.

In the first week, I realized that I'm learning more than just about my topic through this research project. I'm learning how to become a college student, not simply pretending to be one.