Name Maria P. | Role Psychologist | |
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Books Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriage, Bulimia: A Systems Approach to Treatment | ||
Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, educator, and public speaker based in Seattle, Washington. Her areas of work include multiracial families, multiracial identity, cultural competence, trauma, work place harassment, and disordered eating. She is an international authority on mixed heritage identity, credited with publishing the first contemporary work on mixed-race people. She has presented lectures and training in various countries, both in and outside of academia.
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She has edited two award-winning books on multiracial people and produced the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People. The U.S. Census referred to these two texts in the deliberations that resulted in a “check one or more races” format to the race question for the 2000 census.[1]
Root is a former President of the Washington State Psychological Association. Currently she has her own private practice. She also sits on the advisory council of The Association of MultiEthnic Americans and the board of advisors of The Mavin Foundation.[2][3] She also co-founded the Journal for Critical Mixed Race Studies in 2011.
History
Maria Root was born in Manila, Philippines and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from the University of California with degrees in Psychology and Sociology. She then went on to obtain her Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology and then completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and focused on minority mental health. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington where she practices clinical psychology. Her practice focuses on adult and adolescent treatment therapy and her knowledge is broad, concerning topics such as, life transition issues, trauma, ethnic and racial identity, workplace stress and harassment, and disordered eating. She established a group treatment program for bulimia in the 1980s. Dr. Root also concentrates on psychological evaluation, and works as an expert witness in forensic situations; offering expert testimony when cultural knowledge is necessary. She also travels internationally to public speak and train others on her studies of multiculturalism. All of her published work about her research has been very prominent in the psychology community, most importantly, her works were part of the reason we are now able to “check more than one” box when describing our race or ethnicity. Dr. Root is also a clay artist and maintains her own website when she is not busy with her psychological life.
Published works
Dr. Root has contributed much to the psychology field, but prominently with multiculturalism; her works testify to this.
Root is also referenced in dozens of books and scholarly journal articles concerning race and ethnicity. She also wrote a few crucial articles or “guidelines” for understanding the struggles of race in [America] as well as to help those who are struggling with it personally. These works are: