Isaacs, whose mother is white and father is Hawaiian, Chinese and Portuguese, was born in Honolulu. He spent his childhood in his grandmother’s home, eating Hawaiian food and speaking a broken English called pidgin. His days were filled with diving, spear fishing in the ocean and playing on the beach.

When Isaacs was 7, his family moved to Virginia Beach, a city dominated by a military base. Isaacs’ friends had lived in places such as Japan and Italy, and he didn’t feel singular in his diverse background. Although he didn’t feel particularly worldly, he nevertheless felt somewhat out of place in Virginia. The kids in his neighborhood had lighter skin than his family in Hawaii, and no one spoke pidgin English.

College is another step away from his culture, Isaacs says. “Because I’m not around my father as much, I don’t assert my Hawaiian identity as much.” Here, he hasn’t found a place he really fits in, and when he returns to Hawaii, it is hard to feel he still belongs there, either. “You’re just stuck in limbo,” Isaacs says. “You have to be kind of like a cultural chameleon in a sense.” Isaacs says he adapts his identity to those around him, and it is easy for him to blend in because he looks white.

For some biracial students, however, being a chameleon is hard. “The problem that they face saying, ‘I am biracial,’ is other people saying, ‘No, you’ve got to choose,’ ” says Angela Neal-Barnett, associate professor and research psychologist. “With biracial adolescents, you get two things happening: They choose to identify with one race or they choose to develop a biracial identity.”

For more than five years, Neal-Barnett has been studying the phenomenon of “white acting” in minority adolescents. Through her research, she has talked with biracial youth, most of whom are primarily black and white. “One’s skin color can run the gamut, and one’s hair color and texture can run the gamut.

You have students who look white, but their racial identity is black or biracial,” she says. In fact, the biracial adolescents Neal-Barnett has spoken with almost always choose to identify as black or biracial. Very few identify as white.

Growing up, a black identity was more familiar to James McBride, author of The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, a memoir recounting his Brooklyn childhood with his black father and white Jewish mother. “It’s always been easy for me to stay on the black side of the world,” he says.

But race was only one factor — other elements, such as socioeconomic status, played a part. “I’ve always identified more with working-class people, white and black,” he says. As a youth, he admired those making livings as plumbers, gas station attendants and Wal-Mart employees. “These are the heroes in my world,” McBride says.

For that reason upon others, McBride now chooses to speak at universities, including Kent State, because he feels a connection with the students — students who know what it is like to have a job, McBride says. “I enjoy trying to at least help people put some things in perspective. This is the place where your early opinions are subject to change.”