New Co-edited Text on Multiracial Male College Students
I am pleased to announce my 8th text has just been announced with a Call for Authors. This text will be co-edited with my new colleague Dr. Derrick Paladino. Dr. Paladino is a professor of counseling and Cornell Distinguished Faculty at Rollins College. He has been a counselor educator for 15 years as well as being an active clinician. His areas of expertise are in multiracial identity, college counseling and student development theory, and crisis assessment and intervention. He has authored approximately 30 scholarly works and facilitated over 60 conference presentations. He is the co-editor and co-author of two other texts: College Counseling and Student Development: Theory, Practice, and Campus Collaboration (ACA, 2019) and Counseling Multiple Heritage Individuals, Couples, and Families (ACA, 2009) which received the AMCD Professional Development Award.
Multiracial students attending college experience their race differently than their monoracial peers which has a significant impact on their undergraduate experiences. Yet, few comprehensive texts exist to help inform and guide practice for student affairs practitioners or other higher education professionals specifically about multiracial college men. Improving the college experience for multiracial students will require modifying existing boundaries and providing better resources and support to ensure their inclusion. Since the 1990s, many scholars have focused on the differences in engagement for students with diverse racial identities based on institutional typology, posited theories (Poston, Reen, Root, etc.), or explored student engagement of multiracial college students. Multiracial identity development is an increasingly studied area of research, but there still remains a dearth of research, particularly related to gender.
Contributors within this edited text interrogate racial identity development of multiracial college men in an attempt to widen our conceptualization by “expanding classifications.” Multiracial identity can be limited to and “subtracted” in which multiple monoracial identities can equal multiraciality. These college men often express feelings of frustration and alienation when required to identify themselves by selecting only one racial category. Negotiating this racial subtraction coupled with navigating the nuances of multiple masculine hegemonies facilitates disorientation and diffusion of identity for college men. These challenges of our students who identity as multiracial college men are often invisible or opaque to higher education administrators. The unpreparedness of our college administrators to support multiracial college men is echoed by these students who self-report they commonly do not feel welcome on campus and lack of student engagement with educationally purposeful activities. Others report encountering discrimination because they are perceived as holding privilege because they are labeled as “exotic” and fetishized. This text will explore these themes of tensions of gender and race as well as a unique vantage point to navigate the complexities of race to support the notion of multiracial resiliency in being able to traverse multiple identities.
This text will be the first volume in my new text series Identity & Practice in Higher Education-Student Affairs (IPHESA) which is curated with my senior co-author, Dr. Shelley Price-Williams.
