Diversity Award: Maria Root

By Monica McGoldrick

Maria Primitiva Paz Root is a pioneer who has been challenging the meaning of race in the United States for two decades. Her groundbreaking analyses have made her an award winning author for her books Racially Mixed People in America and The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontiers. Her newest book, Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriage is a remarkable study of interracial marriage. As Patricia Hill Collins put it: "In a time when race is much discussed yet less understood, Root's painstaking analysis of people who are challenging the meaning of race in America reads like a breath of fresh air. Through meticulous scholarship and an array of fascinating first-person narratives, Root provides one of the most comprehensive and insightful analyses of interracial marriage thus far. Love's Revolution makes a distinctive and important contribution to contemporary scholarship on race and ethnicity."

Root's scholarly yet user-friendly research and her incisive, touching and humorful teaching and writing are nothing short of revolutionary on every dimension. In the opening of her latest book, Love's Revolution, she writes:

"Although not intended as a political tool, each interracial marriage helps to change long-held assumptions and social conventions. . . . Love promises happiness and wholeness. Contemporary marriage suggests that fulfillment of these promises is invaluable and worth sacrifices. With love as a beacon, a couple commits to a constructive and transformative phase of their life, believing that they—and the world—will be better off as a result. They believe they can become better human beings through marriage than they can by remaining single. Families support this ideology of love as long as their children uphold two conventions in their choice of partners. Marry within your own race. Marry someone of the opposite sex. Until quite recently, beloved sons and daughters who defied these rules were rejected and disowned. Fear and hate invaded homes that were previously full of love: racism rendered them loveless."

Thus, Maria Root opens her fascinating study of racial intermarriage, for which she spent more than 600 hours over 10 years interviewing couples, individuals and groups to understand their experiences. No wonder Maria has had the ability to break through the boundaries of thought and practice in her remarkable work. She has the brilliance, intuition, and patience to study her subject carefully, personally and with a unique perspective, for which I am most proud that AFTA is offering her this award.

Maria P.P. Root, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist Seattle, Washington, who has researched extensively on the co-construction of gender, race, and class on identity development, and related topics. She developed a Multiracial Families Project and a Biracial Sibling Project at the University of Washington. Her books have been used by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to facilitate deliberations on a historical change to the census for the year 2000. Dr. Root has received several career contributions and research awards from the Washington State Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association, The Asian American Psychological Association, and the Filipino American National Historical Society. She is current President of the Washington State Psychological Association and chair of the Board for hte Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest with the American Psychological Association. Her awards include an Emerging Leadership Service Award, and Early Career Award for Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association, an award for Innovations in the Treatment of Ethnic Minority Populations and a Leadership Citation Award from the American Psychological Association's Committee on Women in Psychology.

A uniquely innovative thinker and researcher, a creative, touching, and entertaining teacher, Dr. Root has a few talents that many people might be surprised to learn about—which reveal her many-faceted personality, her artistic sensitivities and her care for context in all its complexity and detail. She is a great movie buff—she admits she has a special fondness for quirky films, which she loves to use in her teaching—indeed, she has compiled the most extensive and amazing list of films that address issues of race of anyone I have ever known. She has also been a potter for more than 25 years. Her work has been shown in galleries in Washington and Hawaii, and her skills as a potter helped to support her through college. One of her most impressive talents to me personally is that she is a handy-woman. If you need drywall hung, plastering, a toilet replaced, painting, simple wiring, plumbing or framing, she's your woman! Her parents let her be the interior designer for the family home from the time she was 11! No wonder she has been able to offer us such creative re-visioning of our cultural and racial contexts. That is what she is about. She looks, she listens, and she shines a new and radically different light on realities and possibilities in all that she does.

Dr. Root was born in Manila, Philippines in 1955. She moved to the US as a small child and grew up in Los Angeles, during the Watts riots, attending high school where kids had knives and guns and lockdowns were frequent. Because she was a child of intercultural, interclass, and interracial relationships, she developed keen interest in discovering how the problems so often created by these differences can be understood and resolved. She grew up in a family that had overt discussions of gender socialization, class structures, colorism, ethnic and racial oppression. From her mother's intelligence and cultural pride, she was able to develop the strength to realize that White people were not superior, which later allowed her to challenge messages she received about White supremacy. The experience of her cultural and racial ambiguity through others' eyes and the advantage of living in the margins ultimately shaped her understanding of what experience is possible when issues are not clearly recognized and labelled.

Maria graduated from the University of California at Riverside in 1977 with a double major in psychology and sociology, evidence that already then she was trying to put different worlds together to place individual processes in social context on the one hand and to understand how individual differences might influence group processes and social stratification on the other. She then began a PhD in experimental psychology with an emphasis on cognitive psychology at the Claremont Graduate School, but soon switched to clinical psychology at the University of Washington, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1983.

Maria acknowledges her good fortune in having many teachers who encouraged her despite the ways some of them stereotyped her. Among her primary mentors were Ovid Tseng (cognitive psychology), Austin Riesen (animal behavior), Sally Sperling (learning), Edna Bonacich (economic theory of groups and group oppression), Shirley Feldman (gender and mental health), William Friedrich (systems theory), and, in particular, Stanley Sue, whose guidance in her first years of clinical psychology were pivotal for her. Sue helped her, as he has helped many students, especially minority students, to develop a network of bonds that have endured through moves and life changes. He also provided her a foundation for making the links between psychology and sociology through community psychology.

Since receiving her doctorate, Dr. Root has taught in the departments of Psychology, Women's Studies, and American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She also spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. Her work has kept alive questions about the dynamic nature of ethnic identity and the political and historical idiosyncrasies by which race, gender and class influence identity development. I is her creative work in this area for which we are so proud to honor her.

Maria's book Love's Revolution traces the social changes that account for the growth of intermarriage as well as the lingering prejudices and false beliefs that oppress racially mixed families. For this book Dr. Root interviewed many people from a wide spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Speaking out about their views and experiences, these partners, family members, and children of mixed race marriages confirm that the barriers are gradually eroding; but they also testify to the heartache caused by family opposition and disapproving strangers. Root's book traces race prejudice to the various institutions that were structured to maintain white privilege, but the heart of the book is her analysis of what happens when people of different races decide to marry. Developing an analogy between families and business, she shows how both positive and negative reactions to such marriages are largely a matter of shared concepts of family rather than individual feelings about race. She probes into the identity issues that multiracial children confront and draws on her clinical experience to offer child-rearing recommendations for multiracial families. Love's Revolution provides a frank examination of the challenges that racial intermarriage entails. At the same time, it offers insights into the transformative power of love on the individuals in these relationships and points to the revolutionary potential this transformation holds for re-visioning the pursuit of a more equitable society.

Over the last dozen years, Dr. Root has been doing most creative work on multicultural identity. She has developed an ecological framework of identity development which serves as a foundation for understanding the myriad identities that exist among multiracial people. This interactive, contextual model makes clear why we must continue to talk about race and shows how racial constructions have changed identity options over the generations.

For most of her young life, Maria Root couldn't escape the question "Where are you from?" Teachers, friends, their parents, and strangers asked the same thing. She would rattle off her street, city, or some landmark near her home. When that didn't seem to satisfy their curiosity, she would mention her birth country, the Philippines, a place she couldn't remember. Other questions would follow: "Is your dad in the military?" or "Are your parents married?" Root couldn't help feeling put on the spot because of her "physical ambiguity" of being the child of a Filippina mother and a Caucasian father. "That stings," she says. "It was always being pointed out that I was different and didn't fit in anywhere. "With millions of Americans coming from mixed racial backgrounds, those feelings resonate throughout the land. Long a country that has perceived itself as white, the US is facing a change of stunning magnitude as the number of interracial marriages and children multiplies exponentially. "Who are we as a people?" Root asks. "The face of America has changed forever." The thrust of her work is to recognize people of mixed racial heritage and point out the injustices they've faced their entire lives. Being forced to identify ourselves racially by one the multiplicity of our heritages.  Root's "Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People" has become a classic document that at once empowers multiracial people and educates everyone about the social constraints of race that operate so pervasively in our society. The rights she asserts include the following:

I have the right:

—not to justify my existence in this world

—not to keep the races separate within me

—not to be responsible for people's discomfort with my physical ambiguity

—to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify

—to identify myself differently than how my parents identify me

—to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters

—to identify myself differently in different situations

—to change my identity over my lifetime - and more than once

—to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people

—to freely choose whom I befriend and love

Dr. Root conducts all her work in a compassionate, thoughtful, humorful way, refusing the push to over-simplify the complexities of identity development with models which are too narrow to include the vicissitudes of life cycle transitions, multigenerational family process, class, school, work and community contexts, gender and sexual identity, and other complex factors that influence us as we move through life. It is for her richly layered yet clearly and delicately presented over the past 20 years that we are so happy to celebrate her contribution to our field. We hope she will continue to guide us toward deeper understandings of the complex and ever changing meanings of culture and race on all of us in this country and on the politics that have kept us from fully realizing who we are and more important who we can be through the life cycle in our country. She prides herself on having benefited from odd juxtapositions of experiences and friends and colleagues who often see things differently from each other. "Rather than taking sides, my experience of making sense of the margins has been to take whatever gifts each person offers and come to my own conclusions, which are undoubtedly a synthesis of all the thinking to which I have been exposed." I hope we can all learn from Dr. Root to draw power from the different gifts each person has to offer and come to our own conclusion and synthesis, rather than becoming polarized by conflicting points of view or by the mindset of the dominant groups in our society that have so strenuously worked to keep us from recognizing that we are all in it together. One of Maria's greatest strengths is her ability to create a space where multiple differences can stand side by side.

Monica McGoldrick,,M.S.W., Ph.D. (Hon) is the Director of the Multicultural Family Institute in Highland Park, New Jersey. She is also a Visiting Professor at Fordham University, School of Social Service and an Adjunct Professor in the Psychiatry and Obstetrics/Gynecology Departments at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.