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The purpose of this chapter is to explore the intersection of identity, culture, and consumption as it relates to multiracial identity development.

The authors employed a phenomenological approach wherein 21 multiracial women were interviewed to understanding the lived experience and meaning of multiracial identity development.

Findings of this study indicate that multiracial consumers engage with the marketplace to assuage racial discordance and legitimize the liminal space they occupy.

While there is much research related to the variety of ways marketing and consumption practices intersect with identity (re)formation, researchers have focused much of their attention on monoracial populations. This research identifies and fills a gap in the literature related to how multiple racial backgrounds complicate this understanding.

Due to their growing social visibility and recognized buying power, multiracial individuals have emerged as a viable consumer segment among marketers. However, there is a dearth of research examining how multiracial populations experience the marketplace.

This study provides a better understanding of the ways in which multiracial individuals utilize consumption practices as a means of developing and expressing their racial identity.

The racial makeup of the United States' elementary school population is in flux. While much discussion addresses the shrinking White population and the growing Latinx population, less highlighted is the growing number of individuals who identify as belonging to two or more races. This group of individuals currently constitutes the youngest, fastest growing racial subgroup. According to the US Census' projections, the two or more races population will grow by 226% between 2014 and 2060, almost double the Asian population, the next fastest growing subgroup. Though individuals with multiplicity to their racial backgrounds have existed in the United States since its inception, only recently has the government provided the option for individuals to quantify their self-reported belonging to multiple races. The resulting statistics alert educators to the fact that individuals identifying as biracial and multiracial are going to be an increasingly sizable group of students requiring, as all children do, individualized care and support within school walls. In this chapter, I draw upon Black-White biracial women's elementary school recounts to help educational practitioners understand lived experiences that inform young girls' navigations of the intersections of their Blackness and Whiteness in schooling spaces.

Compared to monoracials, multiracials appear (a) to be more concerned about acceptance within their select social groups and within society at large and (b) to have higher differentiation and uniqueness needs. Artworks help consumers successfully fulfill these needs, and multiracials are heavily dependent on artworks in their (racial) identity negotiations. In addition to these needs, familial background, school, and technical qualities of artworks serve as antecedents to artwork consumption. Multiracial identity influences artwork consumption both directly and indirectly. The indirect influence is mediated by social acceptability, group identification, and uniqueness needs. Artwork consumption serves multiracials in two ways: pleasure/escape and communication/identity negotiation.

This research examines the impact of biculturalism on the decision making, identity perceptions, and consumption patterns of children of parents from different countries of origin and different cultural and ethnic backgrounds (i.e., biculturals from birth).

This research uses semi-structured depth interviews with the adult children of binational households. We use our Cross Ball and Jar (CBJ) projective technique, which utilizes a tactile, hands-on sorting and ranking process to facilitate discussion of the multifaceted identities and cultural affiliations of bicultural consumers.

Our findings reveal that these “true” biculturals, growing up within a bicultural and binational home, have a more fluid, less clear-cut perception of their identity. Four emergent themes are examined: “Openness,” “Splitness,” “Outside the Mainstream,” and “Badge of Honor.”

Based on these findings, the complexity of identity perceptions is revealed. Participants’ discussion of their struggles to fit in adds to our efforts to better understand multiculturalism’s impact, an understanding facilitated by the use of our CBJ projective technique.

This study raises awareness about the consumption behavior of multicultural consumers and their ongoing interaction with mainstream society. Second, our research extends the current literature on multiculturalism and biculturalism, by focusing on this particular type of bicultural consumer. Finally, this research tests the innovative CBJ projective technique, as a simple and flexible interactive tool to assist researchers in exploring complex, multifaceted identities.

Purpose: This research explores parental management and use of media, as part of strategies to affirm children’s racial identities, as well as to assist such parenting efforts. It analyzes how parents construct Black children’s engagement with media, as being a counter-cultural coping mechanism, to temper the potential racial and diasporic discordance of their children’s identities.

Methodology/approach: There is analysis of in-depth interviews about the media marketplace experiences of Black women in Britain. The analytic approach is informed by studies of identity and visual consumption, as well as race in the marketplace, which emphasize how identity intersects with consumer culture.

Findings: Findings reveal that intra-racial, inter-racial, and inter-cultural relations influence how and why parents manage media that their Black children engage with, including when trying to reinforce their Black identities. Findings also indicate how online user-generated content enables parents to seek a sense of support as part of their inter-cultural and race-related parenting efforts.

Social implications: Findings at the root of this research point to the need for media producers and marketers to be sensitized to parental concerns about the development of their children’s Black identities.

Originality/value: This work foregrounds under-explored issues concerning parental race-work and processes of consumer biracialization in relation to media representation and spectatorship.

In an era of global economic expansion, the harsh underside of capitalism clearly affects human subjectivities and consciousness.¹ Emotions, which both express and structure subjectivity and consciousness, reflect and manifest the social reality of human life in its various globalized dimensions. My argument in this chapter thus concerns the ways in which the contradictions as the harsh underside of capitalism affect the subjectivities of racial minorities. For this reason, the relationship between emotions and commodity capitalism is an especially pressing concern for the formation and expression of racial identity in the United States today. To understand the social reality of race in the U.S. capitalist system is to take seriously the affects that express and constitute the critical social thought of racial minorities. As African Americanist scholars such as Cornel West (1994, p. 42) have argued, the ideology of unregulated capital in corporate consumerism creates market moralities and market mentalities that “erode civil society.” The critical thought of black Americans, West (1992, p. 42) avers, suffers irreparable damage by images that relentlessly commercialize the so-called good life:These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others – and thereby edge out nonmarket values – love, care, service to others – handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America.Corporations thus capitalize on civil rights gains while commodifying the activist politics of communities and governmental organizations. In effect, the “status quo” of government that promotes economic justice and civil rights protections is fragmented and replaced by corporate domination and the rule of the free market. Instead of turning to non-commercial avenues of civil society to change oppressive relations of power, Americans opt for consuming social change in a laissez-faire economy that equates individualism and free choice with purchasing merchandise. In her powerful critique of class privilege and consumption-based individualism, Bell Hooks (2000, p. 81) explains how the media's use of race to promote a “shared culture of consumerism” vitiates community values and deflects attention from class antagonism. Such consumerism, Hooks maintains, promotes ambitions for lifestyles of conspicuous consumption and celebrity that renders incoherent and undesirable a democratic sensibility that made civil rights gains for women and minorities possible in the first place (Bell Hooks, 2000, p. 77).

Tourism and hospitality scholars have examined tourists' food experiences in the tourism context. However, little research has been focused on the experience of tasting slow food/wine and the market that consumes slow food/wine. This study aims to (1) understand the factors contributing to tourists' slow food experiences and (2) identify the market segmentation of tourists who experiences slow food and wine at a winery. Four hundred fifty-three online survey questionnaires were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. The critical research variable is slow food experience, which contains 16 items explained by four dimensions: (1) food, (2) place, (3) behavior, and (4) knowledge. Subsequently, a cluster analysis based on slow food experience measurement was adopted to discover the tourist market. The study identifies three markets: (1) hardcore slow food gastronomes, (2) common slow foodies, and (3) casual visitors. In the conclusion section, this study offers theoretical contributions to the slow food literature and managerial implications for tourism marketers to establish new marketing strategies.

Numerous commentators have suggested that Barack Obama represents a new “post-racial” politics in the United States, distinct from a pre-existing contentious form that originated with the civil rights era. Drawing on secondary historical data, Mr. Obama's presidential campaign speeches, and county-level electoral returns from Indiana and North Carolina, I argue in contrast to such claims that post-racial politics comprise the latest in a line of successive attempts by the Democratic Party to articulate the New Deal voting bloc, in which the white suburban middle class is the primary constituency while African Americans are of secondary importance. By addressing the question of “Obama and the Politics of Race” in this way, this chapter seeks to integrate political parties into the study of racial ideologies. Specifically, it suggests that the latter may originate and subsequently develop in the context of partisan struggle.