Out of the Box

I can't recall exactly when NPR started asking us to track the ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and other identity markers of everyone we interviewed for the podcast. The checklist was long—too long and intrusive to run through while speaking to someone on the phone (not to mention it would have seriously changed the mood). So, a producer would follow up later to ask those questions, and we'd input the details into the NPR mainframe. Out popped a report card showing how our podcast and others scored, diversity-wise.

Our podcast, Rough Translation, usually got As. Of course, most of our interviewees were overseas, which often meant they automatically counted as "diverse" by American standards, even if they didn’t perceive themselves that way. What stuck with me most, though, was the awkwardness of these questions when applied to people who had lived across multiple countries and cultures.

Q: What race do you identify with?
A: Where?
Q: What?
A: Which race do I identify with, where?
Q: I don't think you understand my question. What race do you identify with?
A: In Brazil, I was White. When I moved to the U.S. I wasn’t White anymore.¹

At one point, at the end of an episode, I posed a new question to listeners: “Do you check off one set of boxes in one place but identify as something completely different overseas or within your own community?” The response was a firestorm of texts, emails, and voice memos — stories of people grappling with identities that didn’t fit neatly into categories. It’s an old truth that identity is contextual and at the same time deeply ours, and these stories explored that contradiction. We ended up creating an entire episode ("Our Boxes, Ourselves") and still had enough tape for a follow-up ("Boxing Back").

My family history is a mosaic of relocations and migrations. So it wasn’t strange that one year when I was a kid during the Olympic Games, several athletes on the woman’s long-distance race were from countries that my family had connections to. Who are you cheering for, my dad asked with a smile. Well, I answered, I’m shouting for Ireland because we’re Irish. I’m shouting for Italy because I was born here. I’m shouting for Jamaica because Mummy was born there. I’m shouting for the U.S. because she grew up there. And I’m shouting for Great Britain because she has a British passport, and that makes me British, too. His smile faded. You are not British, he said in a flat tone. Almost 20 years later, having married a Hungarian, raising kids in Scotland, I’ve added to the confused mosaic of my family’s identity. I’ve moved on to proudly calling myself a citizen of the world. But when I think back on those years, the desire for an identity, the need for belonging, I still feel uneasy. It’s like a kid standing at the edge of the playground when he’s not been picked to be on the team, putting on a brave face and saying you know what? I didn’t want to play anyway.

— Tomas Sheridan, “Our Boxes, Ourselves” interview on NPR’s Rough Translation

I've been thinking about that episode in the wake of Election Day. This isn’t a segue into political commentary—I won’t add to the analysis of why one side won or what the other side got wrong, but I do want to highlight something about the problem of seeing people in boxes. Terms like “Latino voters,” “Black voters,” and “women voters” might be useful for pollsters, but they lead us into dumb thinking when we start to view our fellow Americans exclusively through those lenses. We risk falling into the tired and possibly irrelevant question Why did they vote against their interest? (a line of thinking that has tripped up analysts since the What’s the Matter with Kansas? days) and we become worse at hearing each other’s individual experiences.

The Upending Power of Open-Ended Questions

I got a note recently from Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, a UConn psych professor and author of a paper in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Inspired by our “Our Boxes, Ourselves” episode, she’d asked a version of that same podcast question to over 400 research participants:

"Do people ever speak to you as if you’re part of a group you don’t feel you belong to? Do you check off one set of boxes in the U.S. but identify as something different overseas or within your own community?"

Her goal was not only to better understand the bicultural experience but also to show her colleagues a new way to study it.

Interesting, I thought. Feeling myself rather delighted that a podcast had inspired original research instead of the other way around, and knowing next to nothing about biculturalism as an academic field, I called Ramírez-Esparza to learn more. She told me that she was born in Mexico and has lived in the U.S. since 2001, and that the main test that researchers use to study experiences like hers is the Bicultural Identity Integration Scale (BII). The BII measures how blended or compartmentalized someone’s identities are. Also how harmonized or in conflict. For instance, how do you feel about a mash-up holiday like “Diwalloween”— trick-or-treating at temples and lighting sparklers for both Goddess Lakshmi and costumed kids? Next month, might you invite both Santa Claus and Hanukkah Harry to the holiday feast? (Hanukkah Harry, in my own blended and extended family, is Santa’s cousin by marriage.)

Why study this all? People with more ‘harmonized’ bicultural identities, Ramírez-Esparza told me, “have better well-being. More happiness.” She hasn’t taken the BII herself but guesses she’d score on the blended side. Still, she emphasized that BII is a snapshot in time and doesn’t capture her roller coaster story: “I was more Mexican when I first moved to the U.S., but now I feel more American—and sometimes even more American than Mexican. These things aren’t stable.”

Ramírez-Esparza also noted another limitation of questionnaires like the BII: the format. “Methods in psychology are mostly based on questionnaires, so it’s hard to step outside that box and ask open-ended questions. It’s less scientific.”

So she got out of the box. Armed with the open-ended question about people who check multiple boxes, she found that even people who reported perfectly harmonized identities according to the BII scale carried their own pain points. “They talk about physical characteristics, like ‘I don’t look Mexican. People don’t really know I’m Mexican,’” Ramírez-Esparza explained. Or they focus on language: Maybe they recently moved to the U.S. and are struggling with a second language, or feel ashamed for knowing English better than their mother tongue. “Others described the prejudice they face daily.” And of course, these conflicts even inside fairly harmonized identities wasn’t exclusive to biculturalism. “Even monocultural people had complex experiences related to religion, gender, and other identity markers.”

None of this should surprise. Experiences of belonging are as varied as people. It is, however, a reminder that even the tools we build to shed light on the human experience (polls, questionnaires, etc, etc) can make it harder to see each other as human beings.

1. For more on this, check out Rough Translation Episode 1, “Brazil in Black and White.”