Multiracial Cognition

As promised, my CGS500/CS585 survey paper on research into cognition in multiracial individuals. (PDF) (PDF, edited)
The material is good, and the basic organization is sound, but I don’t really feel like it’s a particularly good paper; the quality of the writing and the low-level organization both feel a little sub-par. This may be because I did the last couple rounds of writing and editing while drastically overtired (illus: I misread the regression line in the graph, so the 2009 extrapolated US multiracial population is wrong, it should be 13 million). It may also just be that I have a horribly warped set of standards.

The part I really enjoyed, almost to the detriment of the paper itself, was the precursor research. Once I got into the appropriate lingo and started following references I found that there is a reasonable body of research into multiracial persons. I could have happily spent another month heading down the referential rabbit hole and wallowing in reading material. I found a great many things which were either familiar or explanatory to my own identity. In particular, it brought to mind an experience I’ve long found a little peculiar; last time I was in Hawaii, I started talking to the Pleasant Holidays rep (we bought our hotel on Oahu as a package), who was also hapa-haoli, almost as soon as I got off the plane, and had mostly re-normed to a local accent in 5-10 minutes. She was the first of several people to ask me, usually unprompted, how long I had been away [from Hawaii] as though I was local (”Local” is specially connotative there). I’m reasonably sure I’ve experienced the same effect earlier times my family has been out on the Islands, but just not been aware of it. My take is that it is an example of the hypothesis of several of the articles I read; that the lack of a same-race peer group for almost all mixed race individuals weakens our feeling of normative pressure/belonging, and causes a sort of low-level stress, so the sudden presents of other hapa-haolis puts me at ease and causes me to immediately begin conforming.

The other thing I really got out of this paper is the degree to which publishers are an impediment to the availability of information. Particularly disgusting is the LA Times article on president Obama’s multiracial background used for example material; the article was referenced elsewhere, which lead to a paywall, so I tried to use UK’s LexisNexis and Newsbank subscriptions… which refused to turn up a year-old article. I then put the article title into google, and the article in question came up in unencumbered full-text directly from the LA Times page. This is basically the same problem story of ILL hate from earlier in working on the paper. I don’t seem to run into this problem as much with computer and engineering topics, but I suppose that is jointly the result of us all being habituated to working around copyright, and the fact that the vast, vast preponderance of articles in the area are published by IEEE, to who’s publications I have ready access.