A college friend of mine is Asian-White biracial: her dad is White, and her mom is Asian. Remarking on her high school experience, she once said to me, “The White kids would tell me that I’m not White, while the Asian kids would tell me that I’m not Asian.”

Fast forward several years, and I am a social psychologist who studies how people think about mixed-race individuals. This growing research area has already validated one part of my friend’s experience: White Americans tend to see biracial people according to their racial minority background, including seeing Asian-White biracial people as Asian, not as White.

But what about the other side of my friend’s experience? In general, do Asian Americans view Asian-White biracials as White? My collaborators, Nour Kteily of Northwestern University and Arnold Ho of the University of Michigan, and I set out to answer this question.

On the one hand, we thought that Asian Americans might assume that biracials are not really Asian, just like White Americans think that biracials are not White. But we knew from our earlier research that a different group, Black Americans, generally include biracials as members of their own group, and see Black-White biracial people as Black (for example, Barack Obama was largely accepted by Black Americans as one of their group). So we wondered whether Asian Americans would act more like White Americans (and exclude Asian-White biracial people from their group) or more like Black Americans (and include Asian-White biracial people into their group).

Read the full article at Psychology Today.